10 Nov • Written by Stim3 ways to reinvent packaging as we know it
If you are living in a modern, industrial world, a package is something you see and touch every single day - when buying your grocery or preparing dinner. For something that we see and interact with almost constantly, packaging is often perceived as waste, after fulfilling its functions, either to contain, to protect, or to transport.
Among different packaging materials, the most controversial and problematic one is indeed plastics. Today, the world is producing 400 million tonnes of plastic waste per year. Approximately 36% of all plastics are used in packaging, including single-use plastic products for food and beverage containers, approximately 85% of which ends up in landfills or as unregulated waste worldwide.
This reality of waste will not be tolerated any longer by customers and regulators. According to a survey by DS Smith, a British packaging manufacturer, 81% of customers stated that the environmental sustainability of packaging matters to them, so much so that about 40% would pay more for it. In Europe, the EU Packaging Regulation proposal is aiming at stricter laws for packaging players in the European market.
As the trend grows, packaging manufacturers are facing sizable challenges to reinvent packaging as we know it.
Reduction
As of today, when it comes to reducing the negative environmental impacts, the two most common practices employed by companies are reduction and replacement.
Reduction can mean weight-reducing, using fewer materials for a unit of packaging; and the removal of unnecessary packaging. This practice has a lot of potential in reducing environmental impact, but only with radical reduction. For example, halving the weight of glass bottles and the amount of virgin raw materials used means halving their related CO2 emissions.
Yet currently, this practice is under-exploited, with companies aiming at single-digit percent optimisation. For example, Telemont champaign producer is working on a 4% weight reduction of their champaign bottle. Meanwhile, their objective is to reduce 80% of other total emissions. Clearly, the math doesn’t add up here: a reduction of under 10% of weight is no doubt not enough to meet ambitious Net Zero targets.
To exploit the full potential of reduction, companies can opt for radical performance, aiming at a 40 to 60% of reduction of materials. This radical reduction implies the reinvention of the product design and the manufacturing process.
With a client who is a European Food & Beverage packaging manufacturer, we have successfully achieved this level of radical reduction. Indeed, the newly designed food container will not have the exact same shape, as well as the way clients interact with it will also change. Yet, this breakaway from simple single-digit optimisation has revealed blind spots in their innovation strategy and investments. Because indeed, it is possible to create new desirable food containers while reducing from **40% to 60% of total emissions.
Radical reduction can be a powerful lever and help cut by 50% the packaging environmental impact. But it is not sufficient to reach the environmental objectives and should be completed with other high potential levers.
Replacement
Another often-mentioned lever is replacement. Replacement means substituting current materials with recyclable or biodegradable ones, for example, replacing plastic with recyclable cardboard.
Regarding recyclable materials, this practice is rather virtuous, since we don’t extract anything from anywhere anymore, but try to close the loop by collecting and reusing the same materials all over again. This closed loop which doesn’t include extraction and transformation of materials also means a huge saving of energy.
But again, this lever is rarely used on its radical version and its potential thus under-exploited. In a previous article on eco-design, we discussed the fact that substituting materials while keeping the same product design will result in an unsatisfying tradeoff: poor environmental gains, downgraded and more expensive solution with no added-value.
With a client who is a global Food & Beverage packaging leader, we explored new usages & values enabled by the new material, leveraging its specific strengths - instead of copying the existing packaging. We developed a new packaging standard to replace plastic packaging with a more recyclable alternative, while offering a completely new way of cooking food at home.
That being said, recycling is not without environmental impact when it comes to waste collection & treatment. In fact, the real issue lies in our relationship with the packaging, turning into waste as soon as the product is consumed.
Reuse
Let’s imagine this: you buy a bike, you use it one day to go to work, and at the end of the day, you throw it away. This sounds crazy, but this is exactly what we are doing with packaging every day. What if we could shift this paradigm - considering the packaging as a real product with its own value independently from the product it contains?
Once again, the concept of reuse is nothing new under the sun. In Antiquity, the reuse of food containers such as wine and cheese pots was a popular approach to food packaging. The emergence of plastic associated with the era of overconsumption brought the concept of disposable packaging. And ironically enough, consumers had to be educated & incentivised to throw away their plastic coffee cup for example, as strange as it might sound. Today’s challenge in this emerging era of sustainability is to undo what has been done and come back to the packaging reuse paradigm.
The first option is bulking, in which the customer brings & fills in its own reusable packaging in the shop.
This system already exists in some specific shops or is tested as experimentation projects, but overall remains anecdotal. In France for example, bulk currently accounts for only 1% of consumption. Meanwhile, Article 23 in the law “Climate and Resilience” dictates that supermarkets must assure 20% bulk packaging by 2030. There is still a long way to go.
The second option is building a reuse system for packaging, in which the customer gives back the packaging once used. This raises several questions: if food containers are to be recollected and reused, who will do that? What is the collecting and cleaning process? What is the incentive for users to adopt this and for companies to design it?
In Europe, this practice can be illustrated with the case of the Pfand system in Germany, in which a deposit is paid when buying certain products (beer bottles, aluminium cans, plastic bottles, etc.) and paid back when the empty container is returned. But contrary to France, reuse remained the dominant model in Germany whereas it disappeared in France.
The major challenge now is to rebuild the whole reuse value chain and to change consumption habits. In France, the startup Pyxo aims at building an infrastructure for reused packaging. They provide the containers, manage the collection and washing process and reinject the containers in the client manufacturing chain. And most interesting is the way we tackle the change of users’ behaviour with them, based on a new participative business model: consumers finance the containers and, at each reuse cycle, they get a payback. They thus become ambassadors of the program and promote the reuse of the containers.
Conclusion
The packaging industry must pull away from the design presumption that packaging is waste. To really tackle the packaging challenge, it should be considered as a product with its own specific value. Like any product, it should use the minimum amount of low-impact materials, and be built to last as long as possible.
The 3 levers to achieve it - reduction, replacement and reuse - are well known, but they are far from being fully exploited. Achieving drastic results requires drastically reinventing the packaging and its value chain.
Indeed, it is never an easy task for established packaging manufacturers to reinvent their manufacturing processes, product designs, distribution networks, etc. But that is not an excuse to not reimagine, rethink and reinvent. Starting from pilot projects, testing out different hypotheses, and scaling up best solutions - one after another. This is the path to be followed by the packaging industry, which has been unchallenged for the last 50 years and is only now pressured by new laws and regulations.