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Packaging Science and Materials

Includes packaging materials, manufacturing process, and interaction between packaging materials and products.

Packaging science & materials includes packaging materials, manufacturing process, and interaction between packaging materials and products. Those are very important elements for primary packaging. Packaging materials include traditional plastics, sustainable bioplastics, corrugated, paper and paperboard, metals and glasses. The packaging program at Virginia Tech offers several courses based on the above materials, machinery and manufacturing process, and how those are interacting with products.

Successful completion of above courses enables students to enter the following business sectors: packaging material companies (such as plastic chemical, paper, metal, and glass bases companies) as material scientist, CPG companies as packaging engineer, and packaging converters as production or packaging engineers. In this area, the average starting salary of fresh graduate may be $65 to $85K based on the recent VT alumni salary survey.