Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Packaging touches everyone every day.
In the What's Up With Packaging podcast, we examine how packaging is changing and essential issues such as sustainability, legislation, compliance and more.
What's up with packaging? Find out with David Holliday. Hello, and happy packaging New Year. It's goodbye 2024 and hello to 2025. What do you think are going to be the key packaging topics for this coming year?
David:It's interesting, I think, that after the boost for particularly for equipment OEMs after COVID, where growth was, quite incredible. We are currently back in a period of more sustainable growth, hopefully at least. And here are just some of the topics that I'm expecting to be covering, both at Packaging News Net and on our social channels in 2025. The first one is sustainability, where during 2024, a number of big brands actually pulled back on their sustainability targets, which I think is rather unfortunate. And there's a number of reasons for these things, but we'll see what happens in that area in 2025.
David:Different countries and various US states are continuing to bring in rules to limit plastics and improve recycling rates, which unfortunately have been going down recycling rates in some areas of late. And again, it will be interesting to see what trend we see this year. One of the things that's really helping with recycling and sustainability is innovative new packaging materials, and I expect to see that continuing in 2025. One of those is going to be one of my favorite topics, linerless labels, which are much more sustainable than conventional pressure sensitive labels. And also, in 2024, we've seen the rise of label free packaging for plastic water bottles and other products.
David:Will we see that continue? Watch this space. In the area of packaging equipment technology, we're definitely going to continue to see an increase in automation with some very cool new ideas. A lot of this is aimed at helping the fact that finding, staff to man packaging lines is still proving difficult even though we've moved on quite away from the COVID era. We will also continue to see AI used more in packaging and packaging equipment and integration.
David:Having more intelligent equipment and systems that can talk and communicate with computer systems, with other packaging equipment is going to continue to increase. And I expect we'll be covering a lot of stories on that topic in the new year. And then the other area that I think we're going to be talking about an awful lot is traceability. The Food Safety Modernization Act is, still moving forward and combined with other initiatives such as the EU's digital product passports, the EU's, labeling for wine and spirit products is going to mean that we're going to see a big increase in intelligent packaging that will help with traceability and identification of all kinds of different products. And that is going to be led in 2025, 26, 27, and onwards by GS one's Sunrise 2027 program.
David:The migration from linear UPC and EAN barcodes on products to the new GS one two d barcodes, whether it's GS GS 1 data matrix or GS 1 digital link. There's a lot of exciting possibilities with that. So there are some of my ideas as to what we're going to be talking about during the next year. What do you think? Let me know.
David:And yet again, happy new year. Let's hope 2025 is a success for everybody. Take care.