ABSTRACT
Packaging is not just a product of the modern world. The first hunter-gatherers carried tools, artefacts and food with them, and to do so they fashioned containers from leaves, grasses, reeds, nuts and gourds, hollowed tree trunks, animal skin and fleeces. The packaging industry as a whole embraces the opportunities that the sustainability issues offer by researching, developing and commercialising natural materials for packaging applications. The rediscovery gives packaging technologists wider scope for innovative solutions that challenge the position of existing man-made alternatives. The chapter discusses the principal natural materials used for packaging, the history and natural properties. It presents a case study of how wool is used for one application that required a material with superior insulation properties. The innovative use of wool-based felt has given pharmaceutical companies a way to ameliorate the serious issue of vaccine wastage using an ancient material in a way that out-performs any equivalent material yet devised by the world's chemical industry.
