Confronted with serious environmental problems caused by the growing mountains of plastic packaging waste, the prevention and control of plastic waste has become a major concern for most countries. In addition to the recycling of plastic wastes, design for recycling can effectively prevent plastic packaging from turning into solid waste at the source. The reasons are that the design for recycling can extend the life cycle of plastic packaging and increase the recycling values of plastic waste; moreover, recycling technologies are helpful for improving the properties of recycled plastics and expanding the application market for recycled materials. This review systematically discussed the present theory, practice, strategies, and methods of design for recycling plastic packaging and extracted valuable advanced design ideas and successful cases. Furthermore, the development status of automatic sorting methods, mechanical recycling of individual and mixed plastic waste, as well as chemical recycling of thermoplastic and thermosetting plastic waste, were comprehensively summarized. The combination of the front-end design for recycling and the back-end recycling technologies can accelerate the transformation of the plastic packaging industry from an unsustainable model to an economic cycle model and then achieve the unity of economic, ecological, and social benefits.

Printing technology offers a simple and cost-effective opportunity to develop all-printed stretchable circuits and electronic devices, possibly providing ubiquitous, low-cost, and flexible devices. To successfully prepare high-aspect-ratio Ag nanowires (NWs), we used water and anhydrous ethanol as the solvent and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as the viscosity regulator to obtain a water-soluble Ag NWs conductive ink with good printability. Flexible and stretchable fabric electrodes were directly fabricated through screen printing. After curing at room temperature, the sheet resistance of the Ag NW fabric electrode was 1.5 Ω/sq. Under a tensile strain of 0–80% and with 20% strains applied for 200 cycles, good conductivity was maintained, which was attributed to the inherent flexibility of the Ag NWs and the intrinsic structure of the interlocked texture.

Self-heating packaging has broad application prospects in the fields of food, medical and outdoor use, but traditional chemical heating methods have problems such as uneven heating, low thermal efficiency, high rigidity and insufficient safety.