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The trading nations liberalize their markets and reduce barriers to trade. The European countries come closer to realizing a continental internal market. The companies are internationalizing their value-creation chains. The phenomenon of the time is called globalization. The Internet is the medium of the time. The “New Economy” is based on information technology. E-commerce changes the perception of business processes.
In the sciences too, there are attempts to overcome limits. In 1990 the human genome project starts. The foodstuff industry produces genetically modified plants. In society, there exists a wide variety of divergent ways to present oneself. The minimalist fashion of Calvin Klein is on sale just as well as tattoos and piercings. The gender roles melt away in the unisex look and androgyny. The individual is able to select an option for self-expression that is adequate to him/her. In sit-coms, talk-shows and reality shows, television makes private affairs public. The consumer goods companies have to adjust their product ranges and marketing activities to ever more divergent target groups.
With the world wide web, a gateway to the world opens up from the comfort of a chair at home. Towards the end of the century, Amazon and eBay introduce a new era of consumption. Mobile telephones first catch on in the jacket pockets of high-earning business people. The devices then become cheaper and thus also attractive for private use. Communication becomes more incessant. It is always and everywhere possible to participate in the flow of information.
The middle class consumer has a new price awareness. Purchasing power is deducted from retailing and its branded items. Despite this, the different purchasing channels are not a one-way street. Consumption is spread out over the different distribution channels. In one single household, everything can be represented from eBay to Aldi to the organic supermarket.
There had already been indications of it for a long time and now many states become active: The proportion of packaging in waste accumulation is to be limited. In 1991, Germany introduces the packaging ordinance. The manufacturers are obliged to take back their sales packaging and recycle it. Most free themselves from this individual duty by joining the “Green Point” (Grüner Punkt) system for a fee.
The interpack gained further groups of customers due to the increasing liberalization of the Eastern European states and the opening of their borders. At the 1990 trade fair, which was opened by Honorary President Otto Hänsel, the former GDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were represented with exhibitors for the first time. In 1993 the fair took place under the direction of the new interpack President Ernst H. Berndl. The trade fair for metal packaging Metpack was held at the same time as interpack in the nearby city of Essen. Many visitors used the free shuttle coach service to visit both fairs. The interpack 1999 was intended to show the packaging industry the way into the new millennium. Packaging mechanical engineering had by then become the most important purchaser of robot systems after the automobile industry. A trend towards intelligent monitoring systems became evident together with continuing automation based on computer technology.
The packaging industry extends its range of products because its target groups are diversifying more and more. The packaging companies are called upon to develop solutions to produce cost-effectively even in small and very small batches. This also changes the requirements made on the packaging industry as a supplier. Its potential customers are increasingly more multinational groups, particularly in consumer goods and pharmaceuticals. A task that everybody involved in the value creation chain has to face is the political demand to reduce packaging waste, to increase the recycling cycle and to increase the proportion of repeated-use packaging. The legal regulations passed in the different industrial nations vary, but they have the same general thrust: Less is more.
Plastics from renewable raw materials are in fashion at the beginning of the 90s. New materials are being developed. The innovations in this field presented at the interpack 1990 and 1993 meet with a good broad response, not just among specialists. Bio-plastics do not manage to break through in the market, however. On the other hand, the topics of environmentally friendly products and processes are ubiquitous. In the designing of packaging, attention is paid, for example, to whether or not the materials can be easily separated for disposal. Some packaging companies go for single-material packaging. Block bottom bags come into fashion as refill packs. And manufacturers try to reduce the wall-thicknesses of plastic containers.
Safety has always been the first rule in manufacturing medicines, because mistakes can endanger lives. There is now a comprehensive body of rules, in which it is attempted to include all facets that are of decisive importance for safety. The GMP guidelines (Good Manufacturing Practice) were given a start in the 80s by the WHO, and since then turned into national law by the different economic regions. The principle in this is always the same: A constant quality standard in the completed product is only to be guaranteed if the quality control takes place continuously and thoroughly during operation and during the manufacturing process. Due to the importance of the corresponding markets, the versions of the American FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the European Union have a strong influence on the pharmaceuticals manufacturers and their suppliers.
In order to optimize the driving and controlling of a mechatronic system, the mechanical, electro-technical and information-processing-related (hardware and software) parts of the machine are to be regarded as a whole. This is the task that packaging mechanical engineering is giving itself. No wonder, then, that the experts of the industry are increasingly using the term mechatronics, when they speak of their work. In the past decade, it was only isolated packaging machine manufacturers that were trying to fully exploit the possibilities of the new control and drive technologies. In the 1990s, it becomes clear that the requirements of the packaging industry can no longer be met in another way.
Instead of performing the necessary data transfer via parallel cabling, which would lead to thick, complicated cable trees, field bus technology can be used. At the beginning of the 90s, the designers of the packaging industry are already able to call on uniform, manufacturer-independent standards such as Profibus.
The more information flows into the system, the more precisely movements can be controlled and forces regulated. Vision systems represent an improvement in accuracy, making it possible to record the position of a packaging item or to recognize rejection rates with an actual value/target value comparison. The “man/machine” interface becomes more fully developed. As before, there are monitors that display current process data and machine states. In addition to this, however, data can also be entered, although software automatically polls the necessary coefficients. Tried and tested parameterizations can be called up again by the operator.
In comparison to the first three post-war decades, the proportion of electronics and information technology in packaging machines has dramatically increased. The introduction of the first industrially produced microprocessors acts like the bursting of a dam in packaging mechanical engineering. Many companies call upon the services of automation specialists such as Siemens and BoschRexroth. Some things remain as they were in the previous decades. Solid state drives continue to be developed further because there is still demand for machines equipped in this way.
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