How to package your product and help the planet

Glass or plas­tic? Per­haps card­board or cor­ru­gat­ed paper? What­ev­er pack­ag­ing mate­r­i­al you choose, its envi­ron­men­tal impact must now play a key role in your deci­sion. 

Pick­ing the right mate­r­i­al for a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct has always been com­pli­cat­ed. Cost has long been the pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion for brands, along with weight, acces­si­bil­i­ty of design and deliv­er­abil­i­ty. 

Today, envi­ron­men­tal pri­or­i­ties are at the top of the list. That’s thanks to forth­com­ing gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions like the Plas­tic Pack­ag­ing Tax, which will be intro­duced in April, and the Extend­ed Pro­duc­er Respon­si­bil­i­ty for Pack­ag­ing, com­ing in 2024. 

“Sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing used to be a ‘nice to have’, which didn’t real­ly affect your bot­tom line much,” says Nicole Costan­ti­ni, senior con­sul­tant for ener­gy and the envi­ron­ment at Ricar­do. “The new leg­is­la­tion has been com­plete­ly redesigned to make it a pri­or­i­ty, with increas­ing costs [for those who don’t com­ply]. I don’t think every­one is ful­ly pre­pared for it.”

When it comes to the envi­ron­men­tal impact of pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als, it’s impos­si­ble to tick all the box­es, says Costan­ti­ni. Instead, brands should work out their indi­vid­ual objec­tives. These might be emis­sions-based or focused on cir­cu­lar­i­ty and recy­cla­bil­i­ty. The com­pa­nies should then set clear tar­gets, which they then mea­sure using robust data and life­cy­cle assess­ments (LCA) to ensure they’re mean­ing­ful.

Plastic potential

A choice between glass and plas­tic might seem like a no-brain­er. Glass is 100% recy­clable and one of the most fre­quent­ly recy­cled mate­ri­als in the UK, while plas­tic is made from oil and the poster child for plan­e­tary dis­as­ter. But when it comes to mea­sur­able envi­ron­men­tal impact, things get a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed.

“The chal­lenge between tack­ling what is actu­al­ly envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly ver­sus con­sumer per­cep­tion is some­thing we come across a lot,” says Costan­ti­ni. 

Glass can have a high car­bon foot­print. There are emis­sions dur­ing pro­duc­tion and recy­cling and from the weight it adds to pack­ag­ing, which increas­es trans­porta­tion emis­sions. “Using plas­tic that can be recy­cled [can] in some instances be more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly when you’re talk­ing about an emis­sions per­spec­tive,” she notes.

Dr Manoj Dora is an expert in oper­a­tions and sup­ply chain man­age­ment at Brunel Uni­ver­si­ty Busi­ness School. He agrees there isn’t a blan­ket rule that glass is bet­ter than plas­tic. How­ev­er, sin­gle-use plas­tic is the most car­bon inten­sive mate­r­i­al of all, he notes, espe­cial­ly plas­tic film, which isn’t cost effec­tive to recy­cle.

But there’s a prob­lem. At this stage, there’s no viable alter­na­tive for pack­ag­ing per­ish­able foods. It is pos­si­ble to switch out plas­tic in short, local sup­ply chains, says Dora, or even remove it alto­geth­er. But in com­plex glob­al sys­tems, where fruit and veg trav­el long dis­tances, film plas­tic pack­ag­ing is nec­es­sary for hygiene and to ensure the longevi­ty of the prod­uct.

Dora and his team mapped the sup­ply chain for dif­fer­ent food prod­ucts from farm to fork, dis­cov­er­ing that items were han­dled 32 times on aver­age. “Every time we touch food there is a chance of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, wastage, spillage, and we lose a lot of food in the process,” he says. 

What’s more, stud­ies have shown that cucum­ber wrapped in film will last 10–12 days, but with­out film it will go off very quick­ly. Research by Zero Waste Scot­land showed that food waste can be a larg­er cause of car­bon emis­sions than plas­tic.

Costan­ti­ni thinks the car­bon foot­print of replac­ing more durable con­sumer prod­ucts should not be ignored. “We need pack­ag­ing that pro­tects prod­ucts or it’s not ful­fill­ing its pur­pose. The car­bon that’s embed­ded in the prod­uct usu­al­ly far out­weighs the car­bon that’s embed­ded in the pack­ag­ing,” she says.

Recycling, returning, reprocessing

Card­board is a pop­u­lar mate­r­i­al as it’s gen­er­al­ly cheap­er, made with a high per­cent­age of recy­cled mate­ri­als, and wide­ly recy­cled by UK house­holds. How­ev­er, bar­ri­er lay­ers and lam­i­nates can be a bit more com­pli­cat­ed in cur­rent repro­cess­ing facil­i­ties. 

Recy­cling infra­struc­ture across the UK is in dire need of reform and stan­dard­i­s­a­tion, which should be a focus of the Extend­ed Pro­duc­er Respon­si­bil­i­ty for Pack­ag­ing leg­is­la­tion in 2024.

“The gov­ern­ment is look­ing at encour­ag­ing a con­cept called ‘eco-mod­u­la­tion’, where pro­duc­ers will pay less for pack­ag­ing that can be recy­cled and more for pack­ag­ing that can’t be,” says Costan­ti­ni.

The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion is draw­ing up sim­i­lar ini­tia­tives, which will encour­age brands – espe­cial­ly glob­al com­pa­nies that work across ter­ri­to­ries – to use bet­ter-qual­i­ty mate­ri­als with a cir­cu­lar rather than lin­ear sys­tem in mind. 

“If you’re using more durable and high-qual­i­ty plas­tic pack­ag­ing, that’s much more desir­able for reproces­sors and much more like­ly to be recy­cled into some­thing sim­i­lar to what it was orig­i­nal­ly designed for,” says Con­stan­ti­ni. “It’s some­thing brands need to start think­ing about soon­er rather than lat­er.”

The deposit return scheme, which will be launched in Scot­land in 2023 and Eng­land and Wales in late 2024, will also improve recy­cla­bil­i­ty by incen­tivis­ing con­sumers to return their glass or plas­tic bot­tles and cans for cred­it or cash­back at local col­lec­tion points. This will in turn improve the qual­i­ty of the waste col­lect­ed.

Composting complications

Using com­postable mate­ri­als sends a nice mes­sage to con­sumers, says Con­stan­ti­ni, but she advis­es brand own­ers to be cau­tious. “If a piece of pack­ag­ing is home com­postable but looks like plas­tic and the con­sumer puts that pack­ag­ing into the recy­cling, it will con­t­a­m­i­nate all the oth­er plas­tic pack­ag­ing in that waste stream,” she warns.

Con­stan­ti­ni thinks such mate­r­i­al has its place, but it needs to be well com­mu­ni­cat­ed to con­sumers on the pack­ag­ing. This works well for brands that are known for their envi­ron­men­tal cre­den­tials, such as Fin­is­terre, an out­door cloth­ing brand that uses bio-based pack­ag­ing which con­sumers can dis­solve them­selves using hot water.

“It’s impor­tant for brands like that to be lead­ing the way and push­ing the bound­aries when it comes to bio-based mate­ri­als,” she says.

Dora thinks the UK gov­ern­ment should encour­age more invest­ment and research into bio-based mate­ri­als, point­ing to the use of banana leaves and bam­boo in coun­tries like India. 

“Every­thing revolves around cost. Plas­tic is the cheap­est solu­tion so far, but we now need to look for mate­ri­als which are cost effec­tive but bio-based with recy­cla­bil­i­ty, so we rely less on plas­tic. We need to start think­ing cir­cu­lar.”