Bag-in-Box vs Traditional Packaging

Bag-in-box is a flexible liquid packaging format that offers both economic and environmental benefits, and it is used across a wide range of liquid products. Set against traditional packaging such as glass bottles, PET bottles and plastic drums, it has very clear competitive advantages, and in many areas it has already fully replaced conventional packaging.

Compared with traditional formats, the advantages of bag-in-box can be grouped into eight areas, of which material use, filling flexibility and storage and transport efficiency are the most direct.

It uses very little material, and that material can be recycled. A bag-in-box holds the liquid in a flexible inner pouch and takes its shape from an outer carton, so a single package consumes less material than a glass bottle or a plastic drum, and the used carton and pouch are easy to handle in recycling.

Multiple product specifications can be run on the same filling equipment. Changing specification does not mean changing the whole filling line, which suits multi-product, small-batch production and spreads equipment investment over a wider range of work.

It is compatible with aseptic, non-aseptic, cold-filling and hot-filling processes, and with a range of other treatments. Different liquid products call for different filling processes, and the bag-in-box format covers these processes, giving it broad adaptability.

Filling equipment is available from automatic through to fully automatic, so the choice is flexible. A producer can pick the configuration that matches its own output and level of automation instead of committing at the outset to an unnecessarily high specification.

There is also an advantage in storage and transport efficiency, which brings storage and transport costs down. A flexible inner pouch shrinks noticeably in volume once it is empty, so empty packaging takes up less room in transit and in the warehouse, which particularly favours liquid products that have to be distributed over long distances.