Standards and Quality Aspect

Standards are the outcome of any standardization activity, formulated and approved either by any recognised authority or by any individual organisation in order to make the system more easy, transparent, safe and confortable.

Standardization thus defined as an activity giving solution for repetitive application to problems, essentially in the spheres of science and technology and economics,aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context. Generally, this activity consists of the process of formulating, issuing an implementing standards.

The standards are used as a reference or guidelines to maintain the quality of any product. Quality is an index as measurement that has to be done through grading or classification technique and should be explicit and may involve a combination of chemical, physical and mechanical as well as biological properties.In general, the quality assurance of any product is required to fulfill the following aspects :

•  Fitness for the purpose of use.
• Totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear of its ability to satisfy instated or implied needs.
•  Customer satisfaction or customer delight.
•  Conformance to customer requirements.

 i) Standards of Packaging Materials

In order to fulfill the requirement of quality aspect for the packaging of raw material manufacturers, converters and user industries, a number of standards have been formulated, issued and published by national and international authorities.These standards are mainly used by that as a guidelines to maintain the quality during on line production, purchase of packaging materials and also by the user industries to ascertain the quality of the packaging materials for different properties.

The following national and international bodies are involved to formulate and publish the standards of packaging materials used for dairy products.

(a) ASTM : American Society for Testing and Materials.

(b) BIS : Bureau of Indian Standards

(c) TAPPI : Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry

(d) ISO : International Standards Organisation

(e) DIN : Deutsche Institute for Normung

(f) NF : Normer Francaises

However, the important standards published by national and International bodies for maintaing the quality aspects in terms of test methods and procedures for various packaging materials are here under :

1. IS 3025 (Part 5) 1983 : Methods of sampling and test (Physical and Chemical) for waste paper - Part 5 (order)

2. IS 3025 (Part 8) 1984 : Methods of sampling and test (Physical and Chemical) for water and waste paper - Part 8 (Taste dating)

3. IS 2798 1998 : Methods of test for plastic container

4. IS 8747 1977 : Methods of test for environmental stress crack resistance of Blow moulded polyethylene containers.

5. IS 9894 1981 : Methods of test for smoothness / roughness of paper

6. ASTM E 398 – 03 : Water vapour transmission rate of sheet materials using dynamic relative humidity measurements.

7. ASTM D 638 – 87 B : Standards test methods for tensile properties of plastics

8. IS 1060 (Part 1) 1966 : Methods of sampling and test for paper and allied products

9. IS 1327 1988 : Methods of determination of mask of tin coating of tinplate

10. IS 4006 (Part 2) – 1985 : Methods of test for paper and pulp based packaging materials

11. IS 4006 (Part 3) – 1985 : Methods of test for paper and pulp based packaging materials

12. IS 5285 - 1998 : Methods of test for Fibre Analysis of paper and board

13. IS 7028 (Part 6) – 1987 : Performance tests for complete, filled transport packages

14. IS 7063 (Part 1) – 1973 : Methods of test for corrugated fibreboard part 1 thickness board

15. IS 7063 (Part 3) – 1976 : Methods of test for corrugated fibreboard part 3 water resistance of glue bond by immersion

16. IS 7063 (Part 4) – 1976 : Methods of test for corrugated fibreboard

17. IS 8402 – 1987 : Methods of sampling and test for pressure sensitive adhesive tapes

18. IS 9030 – 1979 : Methods for determination of seam strength of jute fabrics including their laminates

19. IS 9845 - 1998 : Methods of analysis for determination of overall migration of constituents of plastics materials and articles intended to come in contact with foodstuffs

20. IS 7031 – 1987 : Methods of conditioning for testing of complete, filed transport packages

ii. Quality Parameters of Packaging Materials

Quality is a peculiar or essential characters, It is a distinctive inherent features,property and virtue, It is the degree of excellence or degree of conformance to standard, Quality is an inherent or intrinsic excellence of character type i.e. superiority in kind.

iii. Specifications of Pacakging Materials

This aspect could be further simplified as follows:

A particular packaging materials with respect to different quality parameters could be checked in one laboratory repeatedly or various testing laboratories to obtain the test results. Based on the series of test results, a reference line could be drawn to standardise the test results and finally, these test results are considered as specifications to ascertain the quality matrix of packaging materials. But this is possible only when similar type of packaging materials are used for the testing in the laboratory. However, there could be certain deviations in test results obtained from various laboratories. These deviations are mainly due to the following factors.The type of testing equipment used, The nature of calibration of the equipment,The level of accuracy of the equipment, Test method and procedures adopted, he type of sampling plan followed, The level of accuracy of test samples, The environmental condition of the laboratory, The level of technical know-how of the any test.