How it's made & Giving Packaging a New Life

“how it’s made” is a series documentary that looks into the life cycle of materials, how certain material have been recycled and their process and showing how certain materials can be reused without being disposed of. Also show how certain materials are sent back to the manufacturer where they themselves, recycle and process the materials so that they use the material in future products.

First episode refers to cardboard and the advantages of having it corrugated all the way through the card, by means of advantage of making it flexible. Informs us about the different applications the card has and also how the card can be cut or shaped while in the process of manufacturing. It is also shown that some manufacturers prefer recycled paper for the flutes of the card as it is more malleable and the versatility of the product increases

I found that there is a similarity between episode two and four, in the sense how they focus on aluminium sheets in essence of the manufacturing and how they moulded in the certain shapes like cans and tubes. Aluminium is a very versatile material in which you can mould it into almost any shape, it’s cheap and it’s recyclable. Though the process of obtaining the material from the ground uses a lot of energy but I guess this compensates for the fact that it can be recycled over and over again by melting down the material and rolling it back into sheets or blocks.

The series also covers the materials that are used to produce containers that are suitable for packaging liquids. Paperboard, plastic and foil are the three a materials are manufactured in a very similar way to cardboard and the combination of the materials can lead to such products are juice cartons.

We also venture into the world of glass bottles and how they are created. They are manufactured from raw materials and when the process of breaking them down formed into glass and recycling is a very easy and accessible one. The materials used in glass are soda ash and limestone in which the materials to be formed are heated at high temperatures and heated using cold air. Recycling is an interesting process in which glass has to be sorted into colour groups as they cannot be in a 10% margin of colour fraction when separated for recycling. But with the advancements of technology these days’ pieces of glass up to 50 mm big can be separated into their right groups causing the purity of the finished product to stay true.

We also touch on some plastic bottles and how they are made from PET. How the material is really malleable when heated up at a high pressure and basically can be formed into any shape. But only the new plastic left form the manufacturing process are eased to make recycled plastic as the hygienic factors in that are really important to the public’s eyes. As technology increases, also the way people use and manufacture plastics become easier and also creating new plastics coming through the market as research is conducted