Bin packing is a NP-hard combinatorial problem which provides a certain placement of non-overlapping objects in a container in such a way that one or more objectives are optimised. This packing arrangement has many variants in dimension, namely single dimensional, two dimensional or multi-dimensional. The problem objectives can be as simple as minimizing the number of bins to a more complex one like considering a trade-off between the number of bins. Problems can also be categorized into optimization of a single objective or multi objective. Bi objective optimization is considered as a multi objective one in most of the studies, presented in this review. Solution to these problems can be categorised in many ways. In addition to the limited number of exact methods, the extensive literature on bin packing categorises the heuristic solution approaches into three categories, namely heuristics and approximation algorithms, meta heuristics and hyper heuristics. This article mainly focuses on surveying the effectiveness and applicability of these three categories of heuristic approaches on 2D and 3D packing with both single and multi-objective optimization. © 2016, International Journal of Pharmacy and Technology. All rights reserved.