The Top 9 Sustainable Packaging Trends in 2019
Author: Sophie Kieselbach and Flora D'SouzaSenior Consultants
Source from: https://www.thinkstep.com/blog/top-9-sustainable-packaging-trends-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.
Our Circular Recycling Challenge
While recyclers are springing up all over the place with new technologies, the key issues to solve are (1) volume and (2) quality—we are a long way from where we need to be. Lately, we hear a lot about the volume problem in the news, that South-East Asian countries, especially Thailand and Malaysia, are accepting over 200% of previous volumes of waste for recycling. They dispose of superfluous waste in endless landfills, where part of it ends up as ocean plastic, or they burn it (illegally) in the open air, releasing noxious fumes over local settlements.
While there is a large volume of waste produced, recycling infrastructure remains very selective of the kind of waste it accepts. Recycling technologies that have moved beyond the testing phase can only work with waste that fulfills a long list of criteria (sortability, cleanliness, labelling, coloration, etc.).
So why do products designed for recycling still fail to be recycled? The simple answer is because the infrastructure does not yet exist to handle the volume we produce, so our recyclable waste is exported to Southeast Asia. On the other hand, infrastructure will only expand to handle the large volume if there are sufficient volumes of high-quality waste that can be recycled (e.g., sortability, etc.). Therefore, our recycling challenge is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem. This is where legislation can break the deadlock. The current legislation in and influenced by the EU, however, has only taken care of one end of the value chain—recyclability. Unless recycling itself is incentivized and regulated, the mismatch will continue to result in detrimental environmental outcomes.
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.