Kickstart: Packaging for bulk buying

Bulk buying was a rising consumer trend prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As shoppers avoided crowded stores in 2020, they found there was a certain comfort to having shelf-stable foods on hand.

Add in the lower per-unit costs of bulk purchases and the popularity of warehouse retail stores and you've got a real shift in the marketplace.

The Wall Street Journal noted in 2022 that sales at warehouse stores such as Costco, Sam's Club and B.J.'s were up more than 25 percent in 2021 vs. 2019. A Bank of America survey that same year said 27 percent of consumers were buying more items in bulk.

Those new habits have led to a ripple effect for packaging companies too.

"I think people being home and buying gallon-sized jugs of vegetable oil was really a big boom in business," Steven Rocheleau, CEO of blow molding machinery maker Rocheleau Tool & Die Co. Inc., told Plastics News' Jim Johnson during NPE2024.

To keep pace with that change, Rocheleau developed an extrusion blow molding machine that allows its customers to make large-format containers in a smaller footprint. That, in turn, makes it more economical for packaging suppliers to create regional manufacturing hubs so they don't have to ship finished products as far.

"So a trend toward larger packaging requires a little more focused production to eliminate the freight problem," he said. "Focused machines like this now are becoming more important for our customer base."

Brightmark LLC, a San Francisco-based company, that uses pyrolysis to convert mixed waste plastics into feedstock for plastics, is working with students at Country Meadow Elementary School in Ashley, Ind., on a recycling program to divert plastics from the landfill.

Ashley is home to a Brightmark facility, and at the start of the current school year it launched the recycling program with a goal to divert 4,000 pounds of plastics from landfills. It has collected about 3,000 pounds so far.

But it's not just about the numbers. In a news release, Brightmark says the project is "educating the next generation of environmental changemakers."

Students from each grade are assigned to be a "recycling ambassador" who can make sure their friends deposit items into recycling bins.

DS Smith plc, which has built its emphasis on paper packaging alternatives, says it has hit a milestone of replacing more than 1 billion plastic packaging items from supermarket shelves worldwide. That includes fresh fruit and vegetable containers, plastic trays and shrink wrap on soft drink bottles.

To make that happen, it went back to the drawing board by creating new designs for common packaging products using fiber and paper options or plastics that are easy to recycle.

DS Smith sold most of its plastics operations, including reusable extruded containers, to Liqui-Box Inc. in 2020. That same year it announced its target to replace plastic packaging in common grocery items.