The long, hard road to sustainable packaging

Increas­ing con­sumer pres­sure, insti­gat­ed by what is now known as the Atten­bor­ough effect, and recent pledges from the UK gov­ern­ment to elim­i­nate plas­tic waste by 2042, have forced brands and retail­ers to rethink the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of their product’s pack­ag­ing.

Con­se­quent­ly, numer­ous brands, includ­ing McDonald’s, Deliv­eroo and Ice­land, have made pledges to go plas­tic free or to use 100 per cent sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing.

These promis­es are a win for a brand’s pub­lic rela­tions as well as the envi­ron­ment. But how chal­leng­ing is it for the pack­ag­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to make the change?

Transitioning to greater sustainability must be done with careful consideration

Pack­ag­ing affects the entire sup­ply chain, start­ing with the mate­r­i­al pro­duc­er to the con­vert­er, to the brand own­er and retail­er, to the waste and recy­cling organ­i­sa­tions. And then back to the mate­r­i­al sup­pli­er again.

Giv­en the intri­cate com­plex­i­ties and the often-chang­ing tide of pub­lic opin­ion, the chal­lenge for pack­ag­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers starts with deter­min­ing which new mate­r­i­al is best to invest in.

“Some com­pa­nies are ner­vous about com­mit­ting to buy­ing a new mate­r­i­al or to invest in devel­op­ing a new piece of pack­ag­ing when they don’t know how suc­cess­ful it is going to be,” says Tra­cy Sut­ton, cir­cu­lar econ­o­my pack­ag­ing design con­sul­tant at Root.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, says Bar­ring­ton Pam­plin, a pack­ag­ing tech­nol­o­gist for 30 years and tech­ni­cal direc­tor at con­sul­tan­cy TheP­ack­Hub, there was a push for light-weight­ing mate­ri­als, so pack­agers swapped glass bot­tles for plas­tic ones. Now plas­tic is on the black­list.

“Pack­agers have to react to pres­sure from the media and lob­by groups, but many ele­ments of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, such as recy­cling, are out of their con­trol,” says Mr Pam­plin.

So-called sus­tain­able and recy­clable mate­ri­als, such as biodegrad­able and bioderived plas­tics, which pack­agers may look to tran­si­tion to, away from fos­sil fuel-based ones, are not in fact wide­ly recy­cled, but instead col­lect­ed as gen­er­al waste.

“It should be laid out clear­ly what mate­ri­als can be recy­cled and what can­not to reduce invest­ment risk,” says Mr Pam­plin.

The cost of sustainable packaging can be substantial for manufacturers

Fur­ther­more, in the UK and oth­er places, waste col­lec­tion and recy­cling is not co-ordi­nat­ed cen­tral­ly, but by local author­i­ties, cre­at­ing incon­sis­tences and hin­der­ing closed-loop recy­cling of mate­ri­als.

In Jan­u­ary, Unilever in Aus­tralia called for stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of the waste man­age­ment laws and reg­u­la­tions across three tiers of gov­ern­ment. It said dif­fer­ing recy­cling poli­cies were slow­ing down progress in sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Such a dis­joint in waste man­age­ment can make it hard­er for invest­ment in recy­cling facil­i­ties, thus hin­der­ing mate­r­i­al sup­ply for pack­agers, says Mr Pam­plin, because the waste stock is lack­ing or of poor qual­i­ty. For some mate­ri­als, there is an over­sup­ply, while for oth­ers there is a short­age.

This is even more chal­leng­ing in devel­op­ing nations, which have far big­ger pol­lu­tion prob­lems and where recy­cling is sig­nif­i­cant­ly less advanced.

Using recy­cled and new mate­ri­als are also, on aver­age, more expen­sive than vir­gin ones. “Their cost is almost always high­er because they don’t have the same scale of pro­duc­tion, and addi­tion­al research and devel­op­ment invest­ment is need­ed to change the machin­ery line,” says Dominic Cake­bread, direc­tor of con­sult­ing for pack­ag­ing at Glob­al Data. The cost impli­ca­tions, he says, are much high­er upstream of the sup­ply chain.

“For brands, it will be around 1 per cent on cost, but for man­u­fac­tur­ers it will be around 10 per cent because they have to make an upfront invest­ment,” says Mr Cake­bread.

He adds that these costs tend to come down when vol­ume increas­es and the orig­i­nal invest­ment is recov­ered.

Transitioning to more sustainable packaging takes time

There are timescales of up to 18 months, or longer for larg­er com­pa­nies, to also con­sid­er, accord­ing to Mr Pam­plin, which may require some inter­nal restruc­tur­ing.

“Chang­ing a can to a pouch requires a com­plete­ly new pro­duc­tion line, as well as the need to prove that the qual­i­ty of the shelf life, prod­uct, food safe­ty and how it trav­els are not adverse­ly affect­ed,” he explains.

At present, demand for sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing has only start­ed trick­ling down to man­u­fac­tur­ers, accord­ing to Ms Sut­ton.

“There is no doubt it is increas­ing, but not at the rate need­ed to real­ly encour­age more strate­gic invest­ment by pack­agers to offer a sound port­fo­lio of easy-to-recy­cle mate­ri­als and packs,” she says. “How­ev­er, they have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to invest strate­gi­cal­ly and devel­op an informed pack­ag­ing design strat­e­gy, enabling them to real­ly sup­port brands that want tried-and-test­ed solu­tions, which can be recy­cled.”

Mar­tin Leem­ing, chief exec­u­tive at TrakRap, says if big brands approved new types of sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing quick­er it would accel­er­ate the process mas­sive­ly. Brands, on the oth­er hand, are some­times uncer­tain about imple­ment­ing change too fast.

The Hilton hotel chain has com­mit­ted to cut­ting its glob­al envi­ron­men­tal impact in half by 2030, which involves reduc­ing its plas­tic. But it will do so incre­men­tal­ly, says Maxime Ver­straete, the company’s vice pres­i­dent of cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ty.

“From our per­spec­tive, it is bet­ter to start small and scale up, because the world changes so rapid­ly and imple­ment­ing some­thing across all our hotels takes a long time,” he says.

To man­age the tran­si­tion to a more sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing future, Mr Pam­plin thinks some small­er com­pa­nies may need gov­ern­ment sup­port due to a lack of resources. Where­as, most experts agree a nation­al tax on plas­tic is more like­ly to be cre­at­ed to incen­tivise change.

Many small steps packagers can take to be more eco-friendly

Though there are con­sid­er­able chal­lenges, many of which are out of a packager’s con­trol, there are also numer­ous, effec­tive ways for them to be more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, after all, often goes hand in hand with cost reduc­tions if it is imple­ment­ed at the design stage to reduce pack­ag­ing size and mate­r­i­al use.

Major pack­ag­ing firm, DS Smith use made-to-fit tech­nol­o­gy to pack­age ecom­merce prod­ucts more snug­ly. Their machine achieves a 99 per cent fill rate for a sin­gle ship­ment, reduc­ing trans­porta­tion car­bon emis­sions, an aspect of sus­tain­abil­i­ty often over­looked, accord­ing to Isabel Rocher, the company’s head of ecom­merce.

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty often goes hand in hand with cost reduc­tions if it is imple­ment­ed at the design stage to reduce pack­ag­ing size and mate­r­i­al use

Invest­ment in the tech­nol­o­gy pays for itself in a year, Ms Rocher says. But she con­cedes that the future of pack­ag­ing will be chal­leng­ing for every­one. How­ev­er, those who are “a lit­tle vision­ary and flex­i­ble enough” will adapt, she says.

“Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is real­ly excit­ing if you are invest­ing in the right solu­tions,” Ms Rocher con­cludes. “I think some organ­i­sa­tions will strug­gle, but for the most part it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty.”