Leading firms and organizations in sustainability gathered at The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) annual summit in Washington, DC this week for an energizing couple of days of sharing insight and exploring opportunities to advance environmental and social responsibility. I facilitated a workshop on sustainable packaging that included presentations from Nina Goodrich from the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, John Mulcahy from Georgia-Pacific, and Amit Jain from Pharmavite, along with several group discussions. We discussed challenges with making progress and the solutions that companies are using and that are on the horizon.
A key insight I gained is that “beginning with the end in mind” is particularly applicable to packaging. There are design approaches that could substantially improve the recyclability of packaging. Companies have at their disposal recent innovations such as spray nozzles with all plastic parts, recyclable flexible pouches, and labels and adhesives compatible with recycling. Another tool is the How2Recycle program, since it helps provide consumer recycling communication for packaging options.
Challenges to optimize the package’s end-of-life may persist that call for collaboration and new solutions with suppliers, competitors, and waste stream partners. TSC may be able to play a role in enabling these approaches and this was explored during the workshop. TSC has been able to support pre-competitive efforts in other areas, such as establishing common key performance indicators (KPIs) for sustainable products and packaging.
Walmart and other retailers use these KPIs with their suppliers. Recyclable packaging is measured with these KPIs. TSC’s 2016 Impact Report (the 2017 version is forthcoming) found that consumer product packaging has 67 percent recyclable content and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shows that one-half of containers and packaging are recycled, with the rest landfilled or incinerated. However, this is led by steel and paper/paperboard, with less than 15 percent of plastic containers being recycled. The Walmart Sustainable Packaging Playbook, that Pure Strategies helped develop, noted that “every category has at least one supplier using 100 percent recyclable packaging.” This is a call to action to have more packaging be recyclable and have a favorable end-of-life.
Pure Strategies is proud to be a new member of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which enables these kinds of approaches and we look forward to engaging in this forum and with our clients to further advance sustainable packaging.
