Reusable Packaging News
RPN
Small parts are a good match with standardized containers.
Photo credit: ORBIS
Regional Differences in Automotive Packaging Selection
Approaches to packaging selection have been driven by increasingly global supply chains, but there are also important differences regionally.
For example, in Europe, where space constraints are high and concern about sustainability is very high, the use of third party pooling solutions have been popular, according to Chris Buchanan Director of Sales, Automotive, CHEP North America. “Specifically, CHEP has a very large market share of that packaging,” he said during a presentation at the MODEX 2018 show.
“If you look at Asia, however, a lot of their packaging is still cardboard boxes where it is easy for disposal,” he continued. “Then if you look at the North American solutions and you see it is almost like a hybrid of all the other regions where it does a little of both. Some cardboard, some owned (reusable packaging) fleet, and some pooling.”
China has the largest automotive industry in the world, as well as the fastest growing. And it handles a lot of expendable packaging, according to Transparency Marketing Research:
The competition in packaging industry of China is focused on conventional packaging products rather than developing product specific innovative packaging solutions. Moreover, development in material science has resulted into a large variety of economic bio-degradable plastics that can be incorporated for manufacturing disposable automotive parts packaging. The automotive industry is shifting towards the adoption of disposable packaging due to its several advantages over reusable packaging.