New Feature in Flexible Packaging Market at Home and Abroad

(NPES International Printing E-commerce Website 2008-09-09) At present, taking Jiangsu, Wuxi, and Changzhou for example, there are more than 120 foreign-funded or joint-ventured packaging and printing enterprises has approved in Wuxi and Changzhou, the registered capital has reached more than 600 million. This development trend demands that we must attach importance to the development of packaging and printing industries, among the four pillar industries of modern packaging, paper、 plastics、 glass、 metal, the paper product and plastic flexible packaging are fastest growth.

1. Vigorously develop Paper-based Packaging and Printing Products
The focus of development is making low weight 、high strength, lightweight luxury boxes and folding cartons develop towards the direction of gift and colorful. Firstly, paper packaging mainly based on folding cartons will have greater room for development. Secondly, the application of multi-storey cardboard composite materials is more widely. Due to higher demand on paper product quality and performance from customers, this resulted in the further increasing demand of the multi-materials. Such as wine boxes and food boxes and other boxes, they usually adopt cardboard material of two or three layers and paper-based multi-layer material (4 to 7 layers), which will achieve more widely application in paper packaging field that require a higher barrier (such as beverage cartons)

2. Vigorously develop the paper and plastic packaging
Paper and plastic are the two most widely used materials in packaging and printing industry, which will coexist in the long term. In food, medicine (there are more than 6,000 pharmaceutical enterprises in China, with  annual sales volume 120 billion yuan), health care products, dairy products, cosmetics, detergent and many other fields, plastic flexible packaging are playing an increasingly important role. Currently, the development of global plastic packaging products showed the following characteristics: New PET Packaging is more promising; new biodegradable plastic arouse people’s attention; Great importance was attached to foam plastic with no pollution.
The development focus of the domestic plastic packaging is in the following areas: improving the performance of protection, the high barrier packaging materials that can extend the shelf life , such as the development and application of the high barrier co-extruded composite film etc; The development and application of aseptic packaging material, antimicrobial packaging film, radiation-resistant packaging film; Packaging materials which can be heated in electromagnetic oven and microwave; Packaging materials ,which can control atmosphere in it ,can apply to the storage of grain and other agricultural products; Using composite film in electromagnetic shielding; The web and sheet gravure products will have greater development according to the needs of the market.

3. Increasingly importance has been attached to pollution-free green packaging
At present, China's packaging and printing enterprises are developing in the direction of health and orderliness.
Today, about 20 % to 30% of consumer goods in the U.S. market are in the form of flexible packaging. The factor that promotes flexible packaging market share to grow continuously is the advanced nature of the patchy blocking performance and the economic and high-quality flexographic printing effects. Among them, the flexible packaging share in trade mark printing market in huge, the metal and glass containers in this market are gradually replaced by PET and other hard plastic materials. The standing-pouch packaging will be the most dynamic market in the flexible packaging industry in next 2-3 years.
U.S. printing industry has selected flexible plate as the first choice in flexible packaging printing; the reason is that the overall cost is less than gravure in the small and medium-sized printing volume. The driving factors of the development of flexible packaging are mainly as follows: aluminum-plastic composite film packaging of food, cosmetics and medicines has become a trend; The growing use of drugs of one-time packaging; The increasing demand of household convenience foods from consumers is rising. U.S. businessmen will take different forms of packaging in order to attract potential consumers to buy the same product. For example, tuna, dry cereals take the forms of aluminum, folding cartons, flexible packaging and other forms, therefore, the printing volume become relatively small, which make flexible plate more acceptable than gravure.