Wednesday

Video Blog A

Giving Packaging a New Life

How it's Made: Packaging


It’s amazing how many of us know little about the everyday products and their packaging we interact with.  It’s not until we research and discover the processes involved in creating this packaging that we realise the sophisticated process and technology applied/involved to create them.  Efficient and economical is the key to this process with as many as 10,000 units of packaging, specifically aluminium cans are produced every hour using highly technically advanced machinery. It starts with a disc shaped aluminium ‘slug’ and travels through a series of steps and tooling to produce these cans. Great human intelligence and skill has created this machinery to make it as time efficient and cost-effective as possible, eliminating the need for human interaction and reducing the potential risk for error and contamination.

It’s important for other industrial designers to see these videos and have an understanding of these methods.  This will help them with their future designs and the way they construct the object for creation with machinery. It also helps to design a product that has a life after its consumption to reduce waste and landfill. Surprisingly, the relatively simple aluminium can be melted down and re-used many times over without deteriorating. Whereas recycling tetrapack can end up in a variety of different products i.e. the aluminium layer is separated from the others and is added to the mix of components that make up cement.

Key messages that can be taken from these videos are:

-       * Everyday packaging of consumer products, experience a variety of processes using technically advanced machinery.
-       * Many packages continue their life cycle in other products.
-       * Machinery can monitor the quality control of packaging by an infrared system.
-       * Fully automatic sorting plants, cut costs of sorting and preparing plastic packaging by up to 50%. 

No comments:

Post a Comment