Social Good Engineering Magazine: GineersNow Social Innovation GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 001 | Page 35

Packaging Engineers
and What They Do
by Dion Greg Reyes
M
ost of
the time,
people
are never
interested
in pack-
ages of
products.
Whether these people are in the
supermarket, toy stores, drug stores
and warehouses, they just don’t give
much attention to the packaging;
as long as the package is pretty, it
doesn’t matter because they will be
thrown away after the products are
consumed anyway. Well, it hurts to
the packaging engineers who sweat
their ass out in laboratories and
computer-aided drafting software
just to give the perfect preservation
for your products.

Packaging is more than
just containing the product: the
package needs to withstand certain
temperatures, be of certain shape,
be tamper-resistant, among others,
to properly protect the products
from manufacturing down to
the consumers. The packaging
engineers determine the materials
fit to use for the product, may it be
cardboard, glass, plastic or wood,
which are the most common. They
also choose methods and machin-
ery that go into the production of
packaging supplies.

It sounds easy for most
of us but in reality, packaging
engineering is just as hard as
other engineering disciplines. It
deals with multiple disciplines like
chemical, industrial, materials,
and mechanical engineering to
perfect the design and create boxes,
cartons, bottles and other packing
35
materials that meet specific criteria.
There also needs to be coordination
from research and development,
manufacturing, marketing, graphic
design, and regulatory departments
to address technical and marketing
challenges.

But there is an arising
issue to this multi-billion dollar
business, as concern for the envi-
ronmental degradation increases
– they have to go green and devise
ways to minimize waste by using
the least amount of packaging ma-
terial possible. Efforts to recycle the
packages have gone to producing
recyclable or biodegradable materi-
als.

So there. The next time
you purchase a product with a
difficult-to-open package, it doesn’t
mean to make your life hard. Pack-
aging engineers have a reason for
doing that, they just don’t explain
it on the label. Or to the very least,
the next time you destroy a package
of a product which would probably
be within the next hour, remember
the packaging engineers who made
it for you. Photo Source: ECP Quality