Packaging Industry in Kenya and East Africa: Sustainable Production and Consumption with Silafrica

Historically, resource consumption has been correlated with the economic development of a society. This has led to emergence of wasteful practices in global production and consumption with little regard for optimization.

Resources are finite and with the world population estimated to 9.6 billion people by 2050, three earths will be needed to provide the resources needed to sustain our current lifestyle.

Now, we can not create new earths so there’s a critical need to future-proof production and consumption, and optimise resource allocation to meet the growing demand in a sustainable way. It is generally accepted that correlation does not imply causation and therefore economic development can occur without wasteful practices.

One way of doing this is adopting packaging which plays a vital role in protecting products and reducing waste. For instance, each year, an estimated one third of all food produced ends up rotting in the bins of consumers and retailers, or spoiling due to poor transportation and harvesting practices, a problem that packaging can help to prevent.

One third wastage is wrong from all respects; first, that represents a huge fraction of revenue that will now be reported as a write-off expense for damaged inventory and secondly, and perhaps most importantly, that would be enough food to feed 2 billion people, a huge step in achieving SDG 2; Zero Hunger.

Packaging could help to significantly lower that figure and enable sustainable consumption but there’s a catch to that, will production be sustainable too?

Single-use packaging represents a one-time use item that reaches its end of life upon reaching the consumer. This type of packaging is not sustainable as it represents a linear use of resources. A more circular approach is enabled through recycling where the value of a used packaging is retained by recycling it to a different packaging or product. This now enables sustainable production and curbs energy waste when a package is sent to the landfill, contributing to high embodied greenhouse gas emissions.

Consequently, for sustainable production and consumption, circularity and longevity should be at core.

Locally, Silafrica, the leading plastics packaging company in Kenya and East Africa, offers sustainable packaging solutions to enterprises and SMEs in the food and beverage industry, as well as the agricultural industry, among others, to enable them curb wastage during storage and transit, as well as allow for longer shelf life. Using the latest technologies in packaging, Silafrica is able to manufacture attractive packaging with a high shelf appeal at affordable rates, the key attributes resulting in a profitable business to the packaging consumer. By the sustainable packaging solutions, enterprises and SMEs can have their products/produce reach more consumers due to reduced wastage and increased shelf life and shelf appeal, and therefore realise more profit from the same quantity of produce.

ABOUT SILAFRICA: Silafrica has been the leading manufacturer and supplier of the most innovative and sustainable rigid plastic packaging solutions for beverage, food, personal and home care, and chemicals since 1967.

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