Liberty Intercept Blog

Even if you are an electrical engineer and these are elementary terms from your high school and college days, it may be fruitful to review their meanings and logic to see if you currently have sufficient packaging to protect your company’s products and assets.  

At Liberty Packaging, where our clients are mostly industrial manufacturers, we have labeled the month of February ESD Month, as the weather across much of the United States is colder with less humidity.  Electrostatic discharge is more likely to happen at this time of the year, for instance, when you pull two articles of clothing apart, you hear that crackling noise (charge devise model or CDM) or when you walk across the carpet to touch a metal door knob and zap!....that's the Human Body Model (HBM). 

As JFK famously stated: "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present, are certain to miss the future." During my 18 years in the packaging business, I've watched companies large and small deal with change. It's sometimes easy, often challenging, and the individuals charged with change implementation feel the weight of responsibility to their company and co-workers to get it done right. After all, why make a change, if it doesn't make your business more efficient, with less waste and more savings to the bottom line? The rewards of well-considered change are clear.

I have the black and white map (at left) hanging in my house. It is a digital map of all of the flights across the world over the course of one day. When I am feeling pensive I look at it and think how small the world can be and how quickly I can get, literally, anywhere. On the other hand, the colored map (below right) shows the trade routes of British (yellow), Dutch (green), and Spanish (red) from 1750 and 1800. It’s amazing what 200 years can do. 

Many of our customers take extra consideration of rust and corrosion in the summer. Heat and humidity abound during summer time and can prove to be detrimental to metal and manufactured parts. Often times the winter months do not get the same attention. On a day in the country’s recent cold spell, a day when a polar bear in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo found it too cold to go outside (to be fair it was -42 degrees with wind chill) this misconception could prove to be expensive.

If you were to research “Intercept barrier packaging products”, you would find many different options. Some Intercept Technology™ packaging appears black in color, some copper-colored, some white, and some silver. So what is it with the different colors and what would be best for you? Let me explain.

When a man spends his entire career searching for the best ways to safely control quality in the industrial workplace, he earns the wisdom to be called an expert. John Murphy, Liberty Packaging’s Director of New Business, is a veritable fountain of knowledge regarding detergents, solvents, packaging materials, corrosion, quality in manufacturing and related topics.

Very early in my career in packaging, my boss said, “nature’s egg is the best packaging ever”.  Knowing what I do now, I think, “what are you nuts? (foreshadowing!); no way”. Sure, the eggshell may maintain freshness, but the shell is so fragile that only because of man’s innovation in creative packaging has it been that the egg can be transported, stored, and sold to consumers with limited breaking and spoiling. Without man’s packaging solutions, the egg would only stay local to the chicken farmer and his immediate community. Custom packaging manufacturing has allowed the egg to be raised in one location and safely shared all around the globe.

In a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on economist/philosopher Albert O. Hirschman and “The Power of Failure”, Gladwell discusses Hirschman’s views on failure. Most people are fearful of failure and avoid it at all costs; in fact I read an article recently telling of a prestigious investment bank with scores of high achievers who are driven by enormous fear of failure.  Hirschman, of whom Gladwell states “Hirschman was a planner who saw virtue in the fact that nothing went as planned” takes a different stance.  As an advisor for The World Bank, surveying  its worldwide projects, Hirschman noted World Bank would develop infrastructure in Third World countries as a means to reduce anxiety about the future, presumably to allow for development.  Hirshman’s contention was that the exercise and challenge of development allows for unexpected creativity and well-planned economic growth.