The 1990s rarely get credit as a turning point in packaging history, overshadowed by the plastics boom of the postwar decades and the sustainability wave of the 2020s. Yet look closely and the decade set in motion three forces that still define packaging today: environmental regulation, digital printing, and materials engineered to actively protect what is inside them. Together they pushed packaging away from being a passive container and toward something closer to a functional, accountable product in its own right.
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