One level up from skin are the packages we create for ourselves through clothing. “We live in a retail-oriented society in which we are all aspiring to achieve better types of personal packages,” says Tim Ross, principal in the U.S. brand development and design firm of  Jeans versus Carhart Jeans. It’s all about branding or packaging yourself.” Ross says these choices can serve as a sort of compressed code for transmitting information ranging from what music we like to how much money we make. All of this info is contained in our exterior “packaging,” just like a glass jar of peaches denotes attributes like “natural,” “homemade” and “healthy” more than a tin can, even though both may contain the same quality of peaches inside.

Packaging is impossible to avoid. Many items just don’t come in an unpackaged form – try asking for unpackaged butter in the grocery store, for example – and most things we wouldn´t want without a package: facial cream, perfume, liquid laundry detergent. Need we continue? Since we have to live with packaging, we might as well turn a necessity into our advantage, which is just what packagers are trying to do with containers that are lighter, stronger and more innovative than ever before.

This past August, the Portuguese packaging company Logoplaste announced that it had developed a new method of reducing the amount of raw materials in plastic PET beverage bottles by around 12%. In addition to lowering production costs, this innovation is better for the environment. Lots of firms are trying to figure out ways to reduce the impact of Kendall Ross. “We go out and buy the things we need to package ourselves. A vintage concert T-shirt versus an Armani T-shirt says volumes. The same principle holds for someone who wears Seven packaging on the planet. David Becker, the president of Philippe Becker Design in San Francisco, says that people have been concerned about over-packaging and sustainability issues for years: “As organic food goes mainstream, that shows people are concerned about the product within the package. By extension, they are also concerned with what the packaging does to the environment.” And this is the challenge that his company tackles: developing new, sustainable technologies and helping clients understand that additional packaging costs associated with new technologies are worthwhile because “packaging is an integral part of what they represent in the customer’s eyes.” And Becker speaks from experience: his firm helped the American supermarket chain Safeway to develop its own proprietary brand of organic foods and drinks, O Organics, recently praised for its “gorgeously restrained” packaging design by The Washington Post.

To discover just how important a role packaging plays in this world, I spoke with Fritz Yambrach, a professor of packaging sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology in the state of New York. Yambrach, who specializes in pharmaceutical and medical device packaging, notes that packaging can have an enormous impact on health. For example, drug companies continually struggle with the fact that patients do not comply with the directions physicians give them on taking their medicine. By failing to take their medicine or taking it improperly, patients can suffer dire effects. In response, drug companies try to use packaging to guide compliance. The classic example of a compliance package is the one designed for the birth control pill, says Yambrach. Each day has a pill assigned to it, and it is easy to see whether or not a pill has been punched out for that day. More recently, packagers are investigating ways to use technology to track compliance. For example, a microchip on the container might record how often you open the packaging to take a pill. When you return to your physician for a follow-up visit, the doctor could access an electronic record to confirm that you have been opening your medicine bottle regularly. “The reason I am involved with packaging is that I believe you can actually improve quality of life by providing products that will enable people to live longer and healthier lives,” explains Yambrach. He asserts that huge quantities of food in large cities are thrown out because the food has been beaten up in distribution or gone bad during storage. “This is true throughout the developing world,” says Yambrach. “We can improve the quality of what is produced by using good packaging technology,” and it doesn’t even have to be cutting edge.

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