There is no such thing as a farm animal with a woolly coat that lays eggs, gives us milk and supplies us with meat, nor is there any form of packaging that is ideally suited to every application. Or to put it another way: there is no packaging material that is best suited to protect both the product and the environment in an optimal manner. It follows, therefore, that no form of packaging can – and should – be branded as being green. Nevertheless, certain prejudices and misconceptions persist. Numerous studies have already made it clear that it does not make sense to demonise individual materials. They have shown, for example, that the plastic bag is by no means an ecological urchin and that, in principle, bags made of cotton or paper are no better. A recent study by ifeu Institute on behalf of the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) on the environmental impact of common forms of packaging for food makes this clear yet again. This study clearly shows that the best type of packaging should be used for each specific application, whether it be sheet metal, glass, paper or plastic. The authors of the study emphasise that a fundamentally important criterion when choosing the most suitable form of packaging is its recyclability, i.e. how well the raw materials of the material can be kept in a loop. And plastics, for example, are well to the fore in this respect.
