5 Tips to More Eco-Friendly Packaging

Would you like to reduce the impacts your products on the environment? Do you want to create more eco-friendly packaging for your products? Well here’s a couple of tips we’ve come up with to help you achieve just that.

Choose Recycled Materials

Most plastics do not break down easily after disposal. Furthermore, they often contain harmful chemicals. This adds to waste in landfills and is harmful to the environment.

Traditional plastic can be replaced with alternatives such as bioplastics which are made from renewable materials such as starches, cellulose and bio-polymers. Alternatively, recycled plastics such as recycled PET, are also a more environmentally friendly way to incorporate plastic into your packaging. Minimising the amount of plastic you use in your packaging and substituting traditional plastic for bioplastics and recycled plastics, will help you achieve more eco-friendly packaging.

Remove Excess Space

Even if you use recycling Materials in your packaging, in order to stay eco-friendly, you should use as few of them as possible. This means designing a package that fits your product’s dimensions properly. If there’s excess space in your product packaging, you will not only use more materials to create the container itself, but you may require extra padding to fill the empty space.

Furthermore, the more space your packaging takes up the smaller the quantity you can fit per shipping truck. This will ultimately increase your transport costs and CO2 emissions as a result.

By minimising the weight and size of your product you can help create more eco-friendly packaging and reduce your packaging and transportation costs in the process.

Make Your Packaging Design Sleeker

Strip back your packaging to the necessities. Remove any excess layers of packaging that do not contribute to your overall product. Often, products can be packaged in multiple layers of material, when a single layer of packaging may be just as functional and much less wasteful.

If you want to create more eco-friendly packaging for your products, carefully analyse each element of your current packaging to ensure it fulfilling its function effectively. Otherwise, it might be time to rethink it.

Choose Padding Carefully

Depending on your product you may need to use some form of padding in your packaging. However, this does not necessarily have to be bad for the environment. Making simple changes can help you achieve more eco-friendly packaging.

For example, Styrofoam is unsustainable and requires petroleum for production. Instead, you could try and switch to recycled paper, biodegradable bubble wrap or even corn starch cushioning. Simple changes like this can help make your packaging more eco-friendly.

For More Eco-Friendly Packaging, Encourage Recycling

It’s not enough to simply choose a packaging material that can be recycled if you want to really make an effort at designing more eco-friendly packaging. You also need to encourage your customers to recycle the packaging when they are done with it. You can do this by adding the recycling symbol somewhere on your product’s container along with the words “Please recycle.”

If you have a creative packaging design team, you may even be able to incorporate the message to recycle in a different way without sacrificing your brand identity or the appearance of your packaging.

Our skilled and experienced printing design team is one of the best in Dublin. So, if your business needs professional commercial printing, get in contact today. Doggett Print offers a wide array of print solutions to suit your individual needs and budget.