Vulnerability of the Philippine packaging  industry to the Iran War

The estimated sizes of the global packaging market at USD 1.11 trillion in 2025 and of the Philippine packaging industry valued at USD 78 billion in 2025 will be grossly affected by the continuing Iran War due to rising global oil prices impacting on costs of raw materials, logistics disruptions, export and import trade and other business challenges such as inflation.

Consumerism will be faced with issues of unaffordability with packaging playing a big role in this market economics especially with the petro-based plastic packaging sector.

Common plastic packaging come by way of PET bottles, jars for beverages and condiments, HDPE, LDPE and PP for food products, personal care, sauce cups and other retail packages.

The food and beverage sector which uses about 40% of global plastic packaging is heavily affected. Similarly, packaging cost in the bottled industry is to increase by as much as 45% if the conflict persists, according to Sara Warden of CZapp.

The most widely-used plastic packaging purchased by tingi are the single-use plastic sachets used by products such as three-in-one coffee and toothpastes. With the plastic sachets, products are sold conveniently, cheaply and immediately usable.

Sachets are ingrained into the Filipino consumer’s mind-set and culture. According to the 2020 report of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), Filipinos use a staggering 164 million sachets a day.

Coffee, according to UK Insight’s story on top groceries to diminish because of rising cost of packaging materials, logistics and supply chain disruptions in UK, is one such item.

The others are cooking oil, chocolate (because of the use of costly aluminum foil) and packaged snacks, tinned and canned foods (like for corned beef and sardines) and diary (from milk to cheese and butter).

Others like seafood, fresh vegetables, bread (baguette and sourdough) are affected not only by packaging costs (though minimal) but also because of costs of logistics, transport and connected processes like refrigeration.

The global packaging industry relies on resiliency as a way of addressing the disastrous effect of the Iran War on the packaging sector while focusing on advancing packaging technology and promoting sustainable development and smart packaging alternatives.

According to PIP Director and Past President, Stefano

Paolo Bunag, the country’s Packaging Institute of the Philippines (PIP) likewise focuses on strengthening sustainable packaging development to reduce the overall volume of materials and on optimizing packaging to use fewer resources as one of the pathways to mitigating the vulnerability from the Iran War.

PIP works with over a hundred members of suppliers, manufacturers and users largely by material categories, involved from primary, secondary to tertiary packaging,  such as in paper, corrugated boxes, plastics, glass, metal, flexible packaging and even biodegradable-based choices such as banana fiber sacks and non-woven bamboo/banana panels.

PIP’s Asian Packaging Federation membership is essential as the economic fallout  from the US and Israel war on Iran is, as Time publication reports, most especially pronounced in Asia.

As by and large importers, uncontrollable oil prices are bound to push up costs faster in Asia from food to transport to electronics.