June 29, 2026
Walk through any store, open any online order, or reach into your refrigerator, and you’re interacting with someone’s packaging decision. At Virginia Tech, a growing program within the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials is making sure that decision-maker is as prepared as possible—not just with theory, but with the kind of hands-on industry-embedded experience that sets graduates apart from day one.
Learning by Doing, With Real Stakes
The foundation of Virginia Tech’s Packaging Systems and Design program is a simple but powerful conviction: students learn best when the problems are real. For more than five years, students have worked directly with a major electronics manufacturer to redesign that company’s products using only fiber-based packaging materials—with the goal of achieving full curbside recyclability. It’s not a simulation or a classroom exercise. Students are solving an actual industry challenge, navigating real constraints around material performance, cost, and consumer convenience, and delivering work that matters to a global brand.
That same philosophy runs through the program’s work with IKEA. Virginia Tech’s corrugated packaging laboratory is one of only four IKEA-certified labs in the world—and the only one housed within a university. Students working in the lab don’t simply run corrugated board tests once as part of a course. They conduct ongoing quality testing that helps IKEA verify that its corrugated board suppliers are meeting rigorous specifications. The work gives students deep, practical fluency with industry-standard testing procedures, and it comes with a tangible benefit: Students are paid for their time in the lab, helping them offset the cost of their education while building the kind of documented employer-ready experience that makes them stand out on the job market.
New Equipment, Expanded Capabilities
With support from the International Corrugated Packaging Foundation, the program has significantly upgraded its testing and prototyping infrastructure. New additions include a Kongsberg cutting table, a flatbed printer, a modern edge-crush tester (ECT), a burst tester, and a cushion tester—all focused on evaluating the performance of fiber-based packaging materials. Together, these tools give students the ability to design, prototype, and rigorously test packaging solutions within a single facility, closing the loop between concept and validated performance.
The program has also deepened its partnership with Ranpak, an innovative manufacturer of fiber-based protective packaging. Through this collaboration, students gain direct, exploratory access to fiber-based cushioning materials, allowing them to experiment with sustainable alternatives to foam and plastic at a stage when most students are still reading about them in textbooks. As the industry faces mounting pressure to eliminate petroleum-based materials, that hands-on familiarity is a genuine career advantage.
Sustainability as a Core Competency
Virginia Tech recently launched a new major in Sustainable Systems Science and embedded a sustainability core directly into the packaging curriculum. These additions give students the conceptual and quantitative tools to engage with the full complexity of modern packaging sustainability: tracking policy changes, evaluating emerging recycling technologies, modeling the environmental performance of packaging systems, and making decisions that weigh financial, performance, and environmental data simultaneously. Being part of the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials and the College of Natural Resources and Environment reinforces this orientation—students are trained to think about packaging as a system for using natural resources efficiently, not just a protective layer around a product.
Designing for the Competition Floor
For students with design ambitions, the program has made targeted investments. A dedicated packaging design faculty member now leads two additional design courses that sharpen the skills needed to compete—and win—in national packaging design competitions. The program has also built a formal partnership with Virginia Tech’s industrial design program, allowing packaging students to minor in industrial design and bringing industrial design students into packaging coursework. The cross-pollination produces graduates who can think like engineers and designers at the same time, a combination that’s increasingly rare and increasingly valued by employers and competition judges alike.
What the Virginia Tech packaging program is building, course by course and partnership by partnership, is something harder to replicate than any single piece of equipment: graduates who have already done the work before they leave campus.
Laszlo Horvath, Ph.D., is a professor, head of the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials, and director of the Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design at Virginia Tech.
