"The vegetable sector is getting used to biodegradable plastic"

Alpagro Plastics mainly has customers in countries around Belgium. In total, the Belgian company produces 3,000 tonnes per year, of which around 250 tonnes is biodegradable and renewable plastic. "Our biodegradable bags are made of corn starch," says André. "The vegetable sector is slowly getting used to the idea of biodegradable bags, as we can see in the carrot trade. Fresh organic herbs are sometimes in the biodegradable version. The downside is that the raw materials are three times more expensive than traditional plastic. The organic plastic also can't be made fully transparent due to the materials."

André's daughter, Carole Vincke, indicates that the manner of printing has to do with change. "We used to only print one side of the conical vegetable packaging," she says. Now we print both sides and we notice that companies want to show themselves off with a striking print. They are increasingly colourful."

The duo indicates that the company has grown by 10 percent compared to last year. "We've had a dip, but thankfully we're growing again," the director continues. "Thanks to the growth we can run the machines more and more efficiently. We usually continuously run covers on two machines. If it's busy we even use three machines."

The printers of the plastic packaging indicate that they don't just print, but also offer support in designing the print. "We give the right advice and guidelines," says the front man. "We sometimes make our own design and sometimes companies supply them. Now and then we get Word files, which we can't really do anything with. In this situation we copy the design, to make it suitable for printing."