Packaging Engineering

 Design for Sustainability

Overview

This curriculum prepares engineering students for work in the field of packaging – the successful transport and delivery of a product from the manufacturer to the consumer. In today’s world nearly all products seen at retail are packaged. The manufacture of packaged goods is a multi-billion dollar business, and represents a major component of both the New Jersey and United States economies. The success of every package demands the skills of a multi-disciplinary specialist – the packaging engineer. Packaging Engineering is a broad field that draws heavily from chemical, industrial, materials, and mechanical engineering. It also requires a strong background in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and computers. The Packaging Engineering option in Applied Sciences in Engineering is designed to meet this need.

Consider 

Americans drink more than eight billion gallons of bottled water every year, but only twenty-eight percent of the used

polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic  bottles are recycled. The rest of the bottles go into landfills, where they take about a thousand years to degrade,”

says Professor Hae Chang Gea, the Director of Packaging  Engineering Program.  

As packaging engineers, it is pertinent to consider balance. A bottle needs to have a fairly rigid wall so it does not flop over onto your desk. But the wall has to be thin in order to minimize material usage and to reduce waste when that bottle gets tossed into a landfill. This dilemma, on top of the consideration for individual shapes and labels for marketing, becomes an important yet lucrative business for companies. The comprehensive curriculum at Rutgers University School of Engineering—the only packaging program housed in an engineering school—supports applications that meet the growing need for innovation, efficiency, and marketability.  

For full course information and curriculum:

http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/packaging