Sustainable production has become a highly desirable goal for the food industry, not only for environmental reasons, but also because it has the potential to deliver significant business value. This is especially true for food and drink packaging. But while sustainable packaging may carry the potential for substantial benefits, achieving those benefits is a far from simple task that cannot be undertaken in isolation. The packaging industry is beginning to address the sustainability issue seriously, but there is still some way to go before food manufacturers can implement truly sustainable packaging solutions.
It would be easy to dismiss sustainability in food production as just another fad, designed to appeal to green-minded consumers and soon to be replaced by the next environmentally friendly-sounding, but rather vague, idea. However, many in the food industry are beginning to realise that the basic principles of sustainable production provide a route to some significant benefits for manufacturers. Even in its simplest interpretation, sustainable production involves minimising the use of non-renewable resources and energy, and that has clear parallels with an efficient business model. But the basic tenets of sustainability also include a lot more of the elements that go to make up a successful business. As a result these tenets are emerging as a source of guiding principles for managing organisations in a rapidly changing world.
Nowhere is this more so than in the packaging sector, where sustainability is set to become essential, rather than simply desirable. Packaging has, perhaps unfairly, become the focus of attention for environmental campaigners, consumer groups, major retailers and legislators. The reason is simple – packaging looks at first glance like a very obvious source of waste. Disposing of it is seen as an environmental problem and it has become a common belief that the food industry uses too much packaging. The pressure to reduce the environmental impact of packaging is growing.
Packaging under pressure
A recent Datamonitor survey of consumer attitudes to packaging in 15 countries found that 39% of consumers were influenced in their purchasing decisions by packaging design, and in the UK, 40% said they would look for alternatives if they thought a product carried excessive packaging. These figures illustrate a shift in consumer attitudes away from bulky, over-packaged products with built-in waste and disposal problems towards much more environmentally sensitive options. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to cut the amount of waste going to landfill and to increase recycling and re-use. They expect food packaging to reflect this and in future are likely to favour products packed sensitively. Consumer attitudes are also reflected in European legislation in the form of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (Directive 94/62/EC), which has a clear aim of reducing the environmental impact of packaging.
Pressure is also coming from some of the food industry’s biggest customers, the major retailers. Take the world’s biggest retailer, US-based Wal-Mart, for example. In 2006 Wal-Mart instituted its ‘Packaging Scorecard’, which is used to rate suppliers’ packaging according to a range of environmental attributes, including greenhouse gas (GHG) production, product/package ratio, transport, recycled content and renewable energy use. These are all criteria that fit well into the sustainability concept. Wal-Mart has good business reasons for this initiative – it aims to cut overall packaging by 5% by 2013 and make direct savings of more than $3 billion. Other retailers are looking at similar initiatives and it will become increasingly difficult for any business to supply a major retailer without first considering the environmental impact of its packaging.
Against this background it is not surprising that many manufacturers of packaged food and drink are looking seriously at ‘sustainable packaging’ as a means of meeting the expectations of their customers and the requirements of legislation. In fact, a recent report by Pike Research in the US predicts that sustainable packaging will grow from 21% of the total global packaging market in 2009 to 32% by 2014. But what exactly does the term sustainable packaging mean in practical terms?
Defining sustainable packaging
The idea of sustainability was first identified and defined clearly by the UN Brundtland Commission in its report ‘Our Common Future’, first published in 1987. The Commission defined Sustainable Development thus: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This involves addressing economic, social and environmental factors and their interdependence in an organisation’s decision-making and activities.” In packaging a widely accepted definition of sustainable packaging has been developed by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a US-based international industry working group with almost 200 member organisations, including large food and beverage businesses like Unilever, Cadbury, Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, General Mills and Heinz as well as major packaging manufacturers such as Tetra Pak. The Coalition defines criteria for sustainable packaging as follows;
It is this ‘closed loop’ principle that characterises sustainable packaging most clearly, implying a packaging cycle that involves no net consumption of resources or energy, delivers economic benefits and doesn’t produce any harmful by-products or safety issues. This sounds like a real ‘win win’ scenario, but of course there is a catch. At present, packaging that meets all these criteria and can be considered truly sustainable does not exist. As Ed Klein, Vice President Environmental Affairs, Tetra-Pak North America, wrote recently, “…currently there is no packaging solution in the marketplace that is 100% sustainable.”
Others agree with that view and also argue that the sustainability of packaging should not be considered in isolation. A recent report called ‘Packaging in the Sustainability Agenda: A Guide for Corporate Decision Makers’, produced jointly by EUROPEN (The European Organisation for Packaging and the Environment) and ECR (Efficient Consumer Response) Europe and intended to help businesses understand packaging sustainability, states that, “There is in fact no such thing as inherently ‘sustainable’ packaging. There can only ever be a more sustainable way of manufacturing a certain product.”
The report contains EUROPEN criteria for packaging, which clearly have much in common with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition criteria listed above, but with one important difference. The EUROPEN criteria emphasise the inextricable link between packaging and product as a key factor in sustainable packaging – packaging is an integral part of the product. This point is echoed in a report from European food manufacturers trade body the CIAA, ‘Managing Environmental Sustainability in the European Food and Drink Industries’. This report stresses the importance of reducing the environmental impact of packaging without compromising product safety and quality and makes the important point that insufficient packaging can result in more food waste.
So it seems that sustainable packaging is far from the simple concept it may at first appear and cannot be achieved just by switching to biodegradable or recyclable materials. Sustainability is a long term goal that can only be achieved by a continuous programme of small steps and improvements. That being the case, what can be done on a practical level to reduce the environmental impact of food packaging?
Towards sustainable packaging
What most experts in the field agree on is the need to look at the entire life cycle ‘from cradle to grave’ of a packaged product when considering sustainability. The life cycle approach is set out in the ISO 14040 series of international standards – themselves part of the broader ISO 14000 series relating to environmental management systems. These standards set out the key requirements for the main tool used to measure the environmental impact of packaging, the Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA. A detailed LCA is a rigorous and complex process that identifies and evaluates all the inputs and outputs of the product life cycle as well as the possible environmental impact. These are likely to include GHG emissions, the environmental effects of any pollutants produced, energy consumption, raw material sourcing and use and waste production. A full LCA can take many weeks to complete and the results will only be as credible as the data used to conduct the analysis.
There are also a number of tools available to packaging designers which can be used to help estimate the environmental impact of different pack designs in real time. One such, an on-line software package called COMPASS, has been developed by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. COMPASS will produce “comparative profiles of packaging design options” and uses a set of metrics derived from the Coalition definition of sustainable packaging. Some large food manufacturers have developed their own tools for assessing the environmental impact of packaging and designing new packs. For example, Kraft Foods uses its own Eco-Toolbox to help build sustainability into each design and an Eco-calculator tool to measure environmental performance.
While it is the environmental impact aspect of sustainable packaging that will require the most time to assess, it should not be at the expense of addressing the economic and social impacts, which are equally important. Factors such as logistical efficiency, product availability, impact on health and safety of staff and, last but not least, profitability all need to be considered when developing a sustainability strategy for packaging. There is little point in achieving a very low environmental impact if the business cannot survive the economic consequences.
Industry makes progress
It is clear that the objective of sustainable packaging is not an easy one to reach, but it should be applauded that Europe’s food and drink industry has already made progress towards it. According to the latest CIAA sustainability report the EU food and drink industry accounts for about two thirds of total packaging waste by weight. However, the total amount of packaging waste sent for final disposal went down by more than 20% between 2001 and 2004, even though packaging consumption grew significantly over the same period.
The drive towards sustainability is also aided by improvements in energy efficiency, greater availability of renewable energy, waste reduction initiatives, better packaging design and the development of new recyclable and biodegradable packaging materials made from renewable resources. As the technology to produce bioplastics from cornstarch and other natural polymers advances, the green packaging options grow. Many large packaging manufacturers are developing products designed to fit into sustainability strategies. International paper and packaging group Mondi, for instance, recently launched a range of biodegradable packaging under the brand name Sustainex.
There is still some way to go before any food manufacturer can claim to be using 100% sustainable packaging, but progress over the last ten years has been dramatic. Driven not only by the demands of consumers, retailers and legislators, but also by the realisation that sustainability is a good way to do business, food manufacturers are expected to make rapid progress in the pursuit of total sustainability over the next few years.
