Think Shrink

Is the electric can opener—that monument to America's compulsive escape from kitchen work—already doomed?

The answer is yes, or so it must have appeared to the throngs who attended last week's 37th annual National Packaging Exposition in the New York Coliseum. Of some 400 companies representing the $30 billion-a-year packaging industry, most seemed to be devising ways to get along without a can opener.

The pull-tab top on beer cans has now been adapted to all sorts of potables and edibles. To replace the pull-tab itself, and end complaints that it causes bloody fingers (which it often does), tape manufacturers, led by 3M Corp., have devised tape seals for beverage cans that whisk off with a quicker and easier flick. Coffee cans are being manufactured with a plastic lid that flips off just as easily. Plastic tubs, first introduced as containers for soft margarine, are being turned out in many sizes for individual portions of everything from shrimp to whisky sours. One company, AEI Corp. of Bethlehem, Pa., makes a neatly packaged travel pack that contains a collapsible cup, electric heater that plugs into a car's cigarette lighter, and ten servings of soup, coffee or chocolate, none of which need an opener.

The biggest news of all, as far as the 42,500 industry representatives who visited the National Packaging Exposition were concerned, was the "think shrink" concept, in which a sheet of plastic is wrapped around products and then shrunk to their contours in heats up to 400°. Shrink film, which is like the clear sheets that housewives already use in place of waxed paper to wrap refrigerator foods or lunch-box sandwiches, has been adapted to large uses. Soft-drink-bottle stacks, eight feet tall and four feet wide, will soon be cocooned in shrink plastic to protect them from the weather and make them easier to handle by forklift trucks.

Rising Efficiency. Along with being easy to handle, able to take different colors and printed messages, shrink film is one of the few products displayed at the packaging exhibition that can be crammed into a small space and easily disposed of. For all their bright new colors, exotic shapes and interesting uses, disposable packages obviously must still be got rid of once they are empty. The average American in the age of effluence piles up 1,600 Ibs. of used bottles, cans, plastic containers and other trash a year; the annual cost of disposing of all of that accumulated waste has risen to $3 billion.

The ultimate, of course, is a package that is used up along with the product it encloses. And the industry is already moving in that direction. On display at the Coliseum exhibition last week was a package of yeast that can be tossed, edible envelope and all, into a bakery's breadmaking machine. This is rising efficiency.