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Rakesh Shah
Managing Director
Windmoller & Holscher India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi
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Plastics are a part of our daily lives and are so intertwined with life that we are using them day and night – from brushing our teeth in the morning until we sleep and through to the next morning – using power, appliances etc. that use plastics in some way or the other, even when we sleep.
Plastics are like by-products of the large canvas hydrocarbon business and therefore their carbon footprint is not so large and their environment friendliness is established by their recyclability and secondary / tertiary post-consumer uses at low cost of reuse / recycling and their light weight makes them extremely friendly to transport, handling and the entire logistics chain, reducing the usage of hydrocarbon fuels compared to most other substitute materials. For example, a truck can carry 60% more water with 80% less packaging, as compared to glass bottles. This also results in fuel savings of almost 40%. A truck that could carry only 500,000 paper grocery bags can transport 2.8 million plastic grocery bags.
Within the vast area of applications of plastics in the consumer sector, flexible packaging shows the above benefits to the maximum and best satisfies the tenets of reduce, reuse and recycle. These benefits are more and more being recognised by the businesses through the adequacy the new flexible products provide for packaging at the lowest cost as a ratio of the packaged materials. For example, for 1 tonne of foodstuff in 1 kg packages, we need only 32 kg of PET, as compared to 350 kg of glass, 100 kg of tinplate, 90 kg of HDPE and 40 kg of PVC. To make it simpler; we pack 1 litre of milk in a pouch weighing about 5g as compared to glass bottle of about 400g, carton about 80g and PET bottle about 30g.
Each year, India consumes well over 10 million tonnes of edible oils. The per capita consumption of edible oils is around 11 kg per year. According to the estimates of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), per capita consumption of edible oils is likely to have reached about 14.83 Kg by 2009-2010 if per capita income grows by 5%.
India's 2010-11 (October-September) coffee output is seen up 3.6 per cent on year with rains improving significantly over growing regions in July and planters using fertilisers on time, say planters and agronomists. The Coffee Board's estimate is at about 308,000 tonnes for coffee.
Indian milk production is expected to increase by 3.9 per cent to reach 113 in manufacturing year 2010-2011, a US government report has said. The organised cheese industry in India, was valued at ` 250 crore in 2006 with a volume in excess of 8000 tonnes. The industry growth rate is estimated at about 10-12% per year in terms of volume and 16-17% per year in value terms. India has per capita ice cream consumption of 300 ml per annum. The Indian ice cream industry is estimated to be worth ` 2,000 crores. It is growing at a rate of about 12%.
The 86,000 crore FMCG industry is expected to witness a lot of action in 2010. With the economy showing signs of revival, the industry is expected to register a 15% growth in 2010 as compared to the previous year.
In general, flexible packaging is seeing growth rates of about 15 to 20% year-on-year and this trend is likely to continue for several years just as they have in the last decade. The drivers for increasing demand for flexible packaging are - double income nuclear families that have little time for cooking, changing lifestyles and social mores, availability of huge number of food alternatives such as packaged snack food, retortable, microwaveable and ready-to-serve or instant cooking food; combined with much higher disposable incomes of middle class that is 300 million strong and growing. The electronic media has created wants in the suburban and rural areas, and expansion of road and rail network with better logistics have caused tremendous expansion of market and retail expansion has further fuelled growth of packaging industry. Need to conserve food and farm produce is another major driver.
From the perspective of a machine builder, in the high quality and high technology segment, our experience has been very encouraging especially in the last 7 to 10 year period. The demand for high-end equipment has been rising, though it is still very little considering the potential of India and its huge needs for full value delivery requiring high quality packaging materials that adequately answer the stringent requirements of shelf-life and other factors such as aroma retention, absence of contamination, reduction of gas, moisture and material transfer.
Prevention of counterfeiting and need for raising the brand equity is pushing the need for high quality graphics and printing. The films will continue to move on a trajectory of quality enhancement in terms of barrier properties, optical quality, down-gauging, higher physical properties, better printability etc. As metalising continues to grow, which it is set to, for both decorative, light and to an extent gas barrier functions, the cast films will need to have the best optical properties and very high flatness and gauge control. We, therefore, foresee a huge demand building up for state-of-the-art equipment, while ‘state-of-the-art’ itself is transforming with advances in control technologies, better drives, superior metallurgy and ever advancing auxiliary equipment and sub-systems.
We see high quality technical film production, both in the blown and cast film sectors, including barrier films of increasingly greater intricacy suitable for more challenging applications as a major growth area. High quality printing at economical costs with high-end equipment will spur growth in the flexographic sector. The traditionally accepted gravure will maintain growth, while ceding some ground to flexo. New applications such as trays made of barrier materials will be seen in the market as a growing product line. Stretch and shrink films are also going to see good growth in the following years.
Other growth areas will be optically superior films, metalising and, of course, the downstream machinery including high speed form, fill and seal machines. |
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