The Importance Of Packaging And Shipping During COVID-19
Why is packaging so important? It’s easy to overlook the vital role that packaging provides in our everyday lives and the added convenience it offers every day. From keeping each grain of rice together and in one place, to holding our cooking oil, packaging pervades almost every corner of everyday life.
Packaging and shipping allow the modern world to function at ever-increasing levels of complexity. Allowing your products to be effectively and efficiently packaged and shipped to you saves you the hassle of having to do it yourself. This division of labor allows society to function at higher and more efficient levels, allowing us to live the lives that we all do today. This is especially true during the current pandemic, for many reasons.
Stay-At-Home Orders
During the current pandemic, when many are confined to their homes for extended periods of time, the ability and utility of being able to ship products efficiently has become even more apparent. From the daily household items and groceries you can’t go out to pick up yourself, to the extra items you need for that new hobby you’ve picked up with all your new free time, these are all dependent on shipping and effective packaging.
During the global pandemic, people have come to appreciate and understand more than ever the effect of shipping disruptions on the supply chain. This has been especially true for shipping essentials such as household goods, non-perishable food items and school supplies.
Shipping Is Dependent on Packaging
For an item to be shipped across the world, it first requires that it is packaged in such a way that it can withstand the rigors of the journey. After all, nobody wants the excitement of that long-awaited package arriving to be shattered and end in heartbreak when you realize your item has been broken during the shipping process.
That’s how custom packaging allows brands to ensure that their products can survive the tumultuous voyages over land and sea; being stacked and restacked, loaded and unloaded repeatedly until they reach their destination on someone’s doorstep.
Never has the importance of the specific needs of each package been more important than in the current pandemic. Especially when you consider that the specific shipping requirements of each COVID-19 vaccine can mean the difference between it being viable or not.
Shipping COVID-19 Vaccines
The way out of the terrible grip that this pandemic has on us is through vaccines. But the distribution of vaccines is not without its difficulties. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine needs to be kept at -80°C, whilst the Moderna needs a temperature of -20°C, which presents a unique set of challenges in terms of packaging, shipping, and storage.
The World Health Organization estimates that there is a huge risk of losing vaccines due largely to cold chain failures and freezers that aren’t fully functional along the shipping routes. Losing large amounts of vaccines could set the world back in its fight to get a grip on the pandemic.
The Bottom Line
Packaging and shipping provide the backbone for the division of the labor that our society is reliant on for its ever-increasing complexity in every field, from science and technology to the arts and beyond. Proper packaging specific to the needs of each product is vital for success in this area if they are to arrive at their shipping destination in functional order.
The pandemic has highlighted our reliance on these chains of packaging and shipping, and the light at the end of the tunnel is largely dependent on the logistics of shipping vaccines worldwide and overcoming the unique challenges that this provides.