Recently one of our competitors reached out to us to thank us for promoting overwrapping and said that they were benefiting by our promotion of overwrapping – over shrink wrap or flow wrap – as a more sustainable wrapping method. Obviously our intent is not to benefit our competitors but to work for what is best for our customers, packaging and society overall. So I was amused to come across the following recently.

AT&T is unapologetic about its opportunism with greening the planet, stating up front that:

“The most competitive economies of the future will be those that turn natural resource constraints into opportunities.” — att.com/telepresencerevolution

Clearly we too would like to be opportunistic about our technology. Overwrapping uses less film and less energy (both items being natural resource based) than alternative wrapping methods. In particular, our machines, being servo driven, use fewer parts and require less maintenance than other overwrappers on the market. This reduces consumption of human resources too.

We offer higher machine speeds than most of our competitors as well.

I wish I could say that we were employing a disruptive alternative but overwrapping has been around for longer than flow wrap, if not quite as long as AT&T’s telephones. We simply were quicker to adopt servo technology to overwrapping than anyone else. But then Package Machinery has been building overwrappers since the mid-1930’s.

So, like AT&T, we would like to make a virtue of our reality and hope that our customers appreciate that their needs and our purposes are aligned.