As world’s largest producer of milk, second largest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables yet home to around 251.5 million under-nourished people and distressed farmers, our focus should be to find packaging technologies that can be used strategically for the nourishment and up-liftment of our rural sectors, enhancing farmer income, generating employment opportunities, providing choice to consumers at affordable prices and contributing to the overall national growth. With the example of the most widely used technologies, let us question why plastic forms the most important food contact layer in the pack used for aseptic processing and packaging? Why do we go for certain polymer based coatings inside the food cans? Can we use any other material than plastics to meet future demands offered by technologies like MAP, CAP, Nano films etc? Are we not optimising our logistics and transportation efforts through use of lighter plastic materials? And all this and more with the ever growing options for recycling, reusing and reduce the packaging waste thereby contributing to the sustainable effort? Not-with-standing that, global annual production of plastics exceeds 250 million tonnes and approximately 50% of it goes for packaging, certainly next question will arise on the safe use of plastics as well as other packaging materials especially in the developing part of Asia and Africa where knowledge, skills, manufacturing practices and standards are lacking. When environmental impact of materials is being more closely scrutinised and researchers and industry continue to project their independent views what is the way forward? To me the need is to have a single scientific body which looks at each material on the basis of scientific research, opinions, evidences and bring useful information to the notice of target audience from industry, government, consumers, students, educators, environment and health professionals for making policy guidelines /rules and support the legal mechanism for ensuring accountability. |
