The Environmental Aspects of Packaging: Implications for Marketing Strategies

Abstract

Packaging plays a crucial role in the world business and economy. One of the main issues concerning this, is that packaging has a significant relation with the environment, in terms of waste, materials and recycling. According to various studies, packaging is absolutely necessary for protection, safe transportation and delivery of goods within the various forms of the supply chain at global, continental and local levels. As such, packaging creates waste which needs to be managed in a way that the consequences for the environment are as less as possible. In recent years, packaging holistic design innovations, contribute to packaging concepts which are sustainable and environmentally friendly. This paper tries to investigate these forms of sustainable packaging design and construction. Further, the main objective of this paper is to investigate and determine the relationship between marketing strategies and packaging holistic design and production, under the scope of environmental protection and sustainability. In particular, the present study discusses packaging strategies that take under consideration sustainability, the environment and the relation with marketing. The present study reveals that the environmental aspect of packaging is quite important. Sustainability and the environment is considered as one of the principal issues for packaging production and there are many examples of successful packaging concepts that are fully environmental friendly. Marketing takes advantage of such procedures and utilize trends and policies for environmental protection by customizing marketing strategies in this direction. Since packaging deals with immense amount of turnover, sales and production, its financial aspects need to be further investigated, in terms of defining sustainability and the protection of the environment as financial-accounting value.