Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd. is a professional underwear sourcing & supply-chain management company based in Xiamen, Fujian Province, in the Xiamen–Quanzhou–Jinjiang knitwear cluster of south-east China. Founded by Will Lin, who has worked in the apparel trade since 2004, the company has been exporting since 2009 and was incorporated in Xiamen in 2013. It runs its own liaison office in Jinjiang and works with a network of BSCI & OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified partner factories to serve retailers and brands across Europe, the US and Australia.
In today’s society, the status and role of product packaging in sales activities is becoming more and more eye-catching. The main function of packaging design is to protect the goods, followed by beautifying the goods and conveying information. With the continuous improvement of people’s living standards, people are no longer satisfied with a subsistence life, but are becoming more and more picky about goods. Similar products are becoming more and more abundant and professional. The brand image should focus on packaging to highlight the product advantages. Under the influence of environmental protection, the consumer market has begun to advocate “green packaging” to make products and packaging materials develop in a pollution-free direction. Product packaging must fully reflect its distinctive personality. It not only relies on pictures, text, and colors, but also reflects cultural characteristics and modern consumer fashion. More importantly, it is the quality of the product itself.
Green Package can also be called pollution-free packaging and Environmental Friendly Package.
It refers to packaging that is harmless to the ecological environment and human health, can be reused and regenerated, and is in line with sustainable development.
Its concept has two meanings: one is to protect the environment, and the other is to save materials. The two complement each other and are inseparable. Among them, protecting the environment is the core, and saving materials is closely related to protecting the environment, because saving materials can reduce waste, which is actually protecting the environment from the source.
From a technical perspective, green packaging refers to an environmentally friendly packaging developed using natural plants and related minerals as raw materials that is harmless to the ecological environment and human health, is conducive to recycling, is easy to degrade, and is sustainable. That is to say, the entire life cycle of its packaging products, from raw material selection, product manufacturing to use and disposal, should comply with the requirements of ecological and environmental protection. It should start from three aspects: green packaging materials, packaging design and vigorous development of the green packaging industry.
Green packaging materials are packaging materials our partner factories produce, manufacture, use and recycle that are harmless to human health, have a good protective effect on the ecological environment and can be recycled and reused. To widely adopt green packaging and develop green packaging, people need to choose packaging materials correctly. Therefore, green packaging is essentially the greening of packaging materials. The so-called green packaging material means that it can save data and energy during the production, use, scrapping and recycling process, and can be quickly and naturally degraded or reused after being discarded, without destroying the ecological balance, and it comes from a wide range of sources, materials or material products with low energy consumption, easy recycling and high recycling rate. Common green packaging materials generally include degradable plastics and natural biomolecule materials.
The new green packaging materials (degradable materials) that are vigorously researched and developed globally are all proposed to address the “white pollution” that is difficult to deal with. Therefore, green packaging materials can be roughly divided into two categories according to environmental protection requirements and the ownership of the materials after use: First, recyclable materials, including paper, cardboard materials, molded pulp materials, metal materials, glass materials, usual linear polymer materials (plastics, fibers), and degradable polymer materials. The second is materials that can be naturally weathered and returned to nature.
Specifically, green packaging should have the following meanings:
1. Implement packaging reduction (Reduce). Green packaging should be moderate packaging with the least amount of use while meeting the functions of protection, convenience, and sales. Countries such as Europe and the United States have listed packaging reduction as the preferred measure for the development of harmless packaging.
2. Packaging should be easy to reuse or recycle. The purpose of reuse can be achieved through multiple reuse, or through recycling waste, producing recycled products, incineration to utilize heat energy, and composting to improve soil. It does not pollute the environment and can make full use of resources.
3. Packaging waste can be degraded (Degradable). In order not to form permanent garbage, non-recyclable packaging waste must be able to decompose and decay, thereby improving the soil. All industrial countries in the world attach great importance to the development of biological or photodegradable packaging materials. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Degradable are the 3R and 1D principles for the development of green packaging recognized in the world today in the 21st century.
4. Packaging materials should be non-toxic and harmless to humans and organisms. Packaging materials should not contain toxic substances or the content of toxic substances should be controlled below relevant standards.
5. During the entire life cycle of packaging products, they should not pollute the environment or cause public nuisance.That is, the entire life process of packaging products, from raw material collection, material processing, product manufacturing, product use, waste recycling, to final disposal, should not cause public harm to the human body and the environment.
Among the above meanings of green packaging, the first four points should be the requirements that green packaging must have, and the last point is the ideal and highest requirement for green packaging based on life cycle assessment and from the perspective of systems engineering. From the above analysis, green packaging can be defined as: Green packaging is appropriate packaging that can be recycled, reused or degraded, and does not cause harm to the human body and the environment during the entire life cycle of the product.
6. Also known as environmentally friendly packaging, it refers to packaging that saves resources, can be recycled after use, has no toxic gases when incinerated, takes up less cultivated land when landfill, and can biodegrade and decompose.
As the concept of green environmental protection, energy saving and simplicity continues to deepen in people’s minds, people are gradually focusing on things around them that can become more environmentally friendly. For example, the current product packaging in the underwear industry is basically recyclable packaging. More and more paper packaging products are widely used in underwear products. The raw material of paper is mainly natural plant fiber, which will decay quickly in nature and will not pollute the environment. It can also be recycled and remade into paper.
In order to comply with the current development trend, the green design concept needs to be applied in modern packaging design. Such design application can achieve a certain environmental protection effect. Simple packaging design is an inevitable choice to advocate sustainable development and improve the human living environment. Unitex underwear packaging uses FSC forest-certified environmentally friendly paper from the perspective of “simple” design techniques to rationally utilize resources and maintain ecological balance. In line with the purpose of minimizing resource consumption and waste emissions, in line with this development direction, the packaging design also starts from the perspective of protection The “functional” form of products, conveying information and promoting sales, has evolved into carrying people’s “expectations” for green and low-carbon life.
· Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd. — OEM & ODM underwear sourcing partner