Originally published on ThinkStep, March 22, 2019
The strongest trends in the packaging industry in 2019 all revolve around circular economy. Why? At least in the EU context, it’s driven primarily by political pressure and consumer perception regarding packaging. China (and now India) are closing their doors to waste, environmental groups are lobbying to stop plastic pollution in the oceans and the EU continues to strengthen its resource protectionism. These developments are at the heart of the EU’s decision to embrace circular economy. Its simple and easy-to-love code relies on the same three words that defined the environmental movement in the 80s and 90s: reduce, reuse, recycle. However, now the EU is passing regulations faster than usual, including regulations to increase recycling rates and recycled content and laws to reduce single-use plastics. As a result, manufacturers are rushing to reach their own quotas and targets, scrambling to solve a puzzle whose edges are still ill-defined. Here we want to provide our views on current trends to draw attention to the potential shortcomings of each and offer suggestions for tackling them.
1. Design for Recycling
More recycling is, of course, a great development. The question is how to enable a net positive effect on the environment and the economy. In order to be recycled, post-consumer packaging has to fulfill a long list of requirements (e.g., separability, cleanliness, labelling and coloration). Manufacturers trying to fulfill those requirements may have to use more material and energy when they produce the packaging than they have done up until now.
Additionally, just because a packaging product is designed for recycling today, does not automatically mean that it will be recycled. And even if it is recycled, the environmental footprint may not be improved. Most recycling technologies currently in use, require a lot of energy and the quality of the recovered material is lower than virgin material. Hence, the designed packaging often has a less-than-desirable net impact on the environment. And this doesn’t even include the effects of having less feedstock for incinerators to recover energy from.
Designing for recycling is certainly imperative to future-proof one’s business, our economy and humanity itself. But first we need to ensure recyclability equals recycling, preferably in a closed-loop system.
Our suggestion: Make your recyclable designs comprehensive by keeping the recycling infrastructure in mind. Regulators should match recycling quotas (e.g., EU recycling rate of 75% of packaging waste by 2030) to regional capacities and plan the expansion of the recycling streams in coordination with those quotas.
2. Design for Reuse
Reuse is more difficult to envision than recycling given our current mindset. It requires us to move away from the way we currently handle packaging—tearing open and throwing away or recycling. It may also necessitate more robust packaging materials that need to withstand washing and sterilization. It also needs to have well-built infrastructure to collect, wash, sterilize, refill and return the packaging to consumers. It is the milkman method made anew.
There have been various small-scale attempts in the past. Since the World Economic Forum in January of this year, the LOOP Initiative has made headlines with all major brands in the cosmetics and personal care and the food and retail industries. LOOP is attractive for these industries, because it projects improvements, not only in the solitary world of circularity, but also in the broader spectrum of Life Cycle Assessment.
While we anticipate these projections to come true, we also feel obliged to report the risks. As with recycling, the risk for reuse is higher if the heavier, bulkier materials designed for reuse have a worse environmental impact than their reuse compensates for. In other words, we should never examine packaging impacts in isolation, but comprehensively, with a systems-thinking approach.
A recent screening study highlighted that a current version of a reusable PET bag carries a much higher impact than its single-use alternative. So much so that you would need to use the reusable bag at least 50 times to make it more sustainable. Manufacturers should therefore ensure that reuse is realistic in the actual customer setting and that that behavior actually compensates for any added impact in the material design changes. Manufacturers also need to calculate the additional impact of transporting, washing, sanitizing (possibly even tracking) and refilling those reusable containers.
Our suggestion: Increasing reuse is a must-win battle for optimizing resources and drastically reducing waste. However, companies need to use eco-design and life cycle thinking (systems thinking) and push for infrastructure of scale with a massive customer-base to make the transition truly environmentally sound.
3. Replace Plastics with Bioplastics
Another trend on the rise is the increased use of bioplastics to replace fossil-fuel-based plastics. People tend to equate bioplastics with biodegradable or compostable, but they are not necessarily either of those. While bioplastics are certainly interesting substitutes (identical in many of their physical and technical properties to their fossil-based counterparts), using them might only shift the environmental burden by reducing the carbon footprint while increasing acidification, the water footprint or other environmental impacts. We also have to keep in mind that introducing bioplastics may only alleviate the plastic problem, not solve it. An ingested bioplastic bag may still choke whales and other marine life.
Beyond burden-shifting, we also have a supply issue. How can we grow enough raw materials required to replace fossil-fuel packaging products with bioplastics? The only way is to increase the agricultural production of sugar cane or other feedstock. But agricultural production is already pressed to its limits, straining land areas that compete with food production. Deforestation to prepare the way for more agricultural land is certainly not a sustainable solution. And even with bioplastics, we won’t solve the general problem of the End-of-life waste streams.
Our suggestion: Invest in R&D, but try to avoid competing with agricultural production. Only use superfluous biomass waste that has no other application. Use eco-design and think about the product’s End-of-life to avoid shifting the environmental burden to another area.
4. Replace Plastics with Paper
Paper is even more frequently suggested as a substitute for plastic packaging than bioplastics (for example, paper cups and bags). However, current available data suggests that paper packaging generally requires several times more mass to fulfill the same function as its plastic counterpart. As a result, the overall environmental impact tends to be higher for paper, except in its carbon footprint. So again, this is a case of burden shifting: reducing carbon footprint, but increasing impacts such as acidification and eutrophication. Additionally, replacing plastic with paper could likely give us a serious supply problem. If we were to replace all plastics with paper, we must either cut down more forests or find areas for reforestation. The latter would be a double benefit, of course, but do we actually have the space? Current data suggests that we still have a net loss of forests worldwide and that we are more likely to lose possible reforestation areas to other pressing needs, such as to the expansion of cities and towns, to agriculture and to industry.
Furthermore, paper and cardboard recycling facilities are already running at top capacity and would need to expand their operations to take in more recyclable waste. And at the moment, recycled paper does not seem to significantly decrease the total environmental impact of paper, at least not based on data we have available today.
Our suggestion: Watch for new developments in the paper market, especially if weight can be reduced. Be aware of the risk of burden shifting—always think systemically and holistically.
5. Reduce and Remove Packaging
Reducing and ultimately removing packaging from products, such as from bulk food items, is a lucrative way of minimizing the materials in circulation and ultimately the environmental impact of packaging. However, as was so beautifully demonstrated with the now-famous example of the shrink-wrapped cucumber, we should not exclude the purpose of packaging when we assess its environmental impact. If the packaging fails to fulfill its primary purpose of safeguarding the product’s quality, the product may go to waste, and the environmental impact of a wasted product is, in general, far higher than that of the avoided packaging material.
Our suggestion: Keep working to reduce packaging material within the limits allowed by its purpose. And if, as with some initiatives, you start a new product line with reduced packaging and therefore reduced product shelf-life, loudly communicate it to customers and continue to help them understand the reasoning behind the changes to make sure that the net benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Life cycle thinking, as always, helps.
6. Shift to Mono-Materials
Laminates and composite packaging from multiple materials constitute one of the biggest hurdles to achieving recyclability (not recycling itself, for which the biggest problem is collection and infrastructure). So manufacturers have made considerable effort to shift to mono-material packaging (laminates included). The risk here is that mono-material solutions can end up decidedly heavier and bulkier than their composite alternatives and may need other additives. The reason is simple, companies use aluminum layers in laminates because of their insulative properties that—when replaced by plastics or paper—require thicker layers and, ultimately, also more mass.
Our suggestion: Analyze alternatives carefully and quantitatively to ensure that for the same packaging quality, the mono-material alternative does not in fact increase overall environmental impacts or shift burdens from one environmental impact to another.
7. Increase Recycled Content
The UK has recently introduced regulations that requires increased recycled content for packaging. It is commendable that the industry is not only focusing on producing recyclable materials, but also ensuring that manufacturers can use the recycled materials for the same application that those materials were derived from. Only then will the manufacturer actualize the true meaning of circularity. But achieving a set target of, say, at least 30% recycled content by 2030, is not as ‘simple’ as exchanging one supplier with another. First and foremost, recycled content in packaging affects the quality of the packaging and might require an increase in the overall weight or an extra layer of protection. Secondly, the recycling of plastics is currently limited to about 5 cycles before the recyclates lose the material properties the industry relies on them for. Obviously, this imposes a supply limitation, which is compounded by the lack of local recycling infrastructure. And we should not forget that recycling carries its own environmental burdens, because of the energy and materials required for the process. Overall, the environmental impact may or may not improve with the 30% targets, but companies wanting to achieve this target may have to reckon with supply risks.
Our recommendation: Gradually and collaboratively support the growth of local recycling infrastructure and continue to include chemical recycling as an option. For the latter, political lobbying may be needed to redefine governmental regulations on what counts as recycling.
8. New Out-of-the-Box Ideas
What we haven’t touched on until now are new, out-of-the-box packaging ideas. There are a lot of innovative ideas out there, such as changing the form of packaging, completely enhancing stackability, emptiability, etc. We do know that for you to meet with success in outside-the-box thinking, you need not only brain power, but courage and investment. Innovation is hard, but all the more rewarding.
Our suggestion: Take the opportunity to reinvent packaging and don’t be afraid to make alliances with suppliers as well as the competition. Innovation is imperative to a sustainable future.
9. Customer is Key
While the customer is part of the change process in many of the above-mentioned initiatives, we want to emphasize this as a separate trend. Brands communicating and educating their customers on how to responsibly use and dispose of packaging are a key to the success in any and all areas. This positive development is luckily on the rise. The only danger is if we move toward over-simplified (and eventually incorrect) qualitative descriptions designed to enable all customers to decipher the message, but actually mislead the public.
Our suggestion: Ensure that the environmentally solid ideals are communicated appropriately for different levels of customer curiosity. Today we have the technology to add a tiny QR code to a label and link more details that would be too much for most customers, but satisfy the curiosity of others. Focus not only on engaging unresponsive or environmentally disinterested customers, but also on shaping the opinions of those who may have dragged onto the misled bandwagon (e.g., standard-bearers of “no packaging is the best packaging”).