Sustainable Packaging Trends to Consider

For a lot of people, sustainability is a huge focus. With more and more governmental bodies also pushing for sustainability, it’s important to look at this, and to add it to your business.

Design for Recycling 

A big thing that people look for is recycling.It’s a big requirement, and a lot of companies are trying to produce stuff using less energy and material than before. Recycling is great for a lot of people, but the problem with recycling is not everything is recycled. There are so many requirements for this that not everyone follows this, and most technologies require you to have a bit of energy, and the quality of this is a lot less than the virgin kinds of material.  It’s important to look at this, because it may not be saving energy.

You want to design the items so that they can be recycled, but the problem is, you want a closed-loop type of system. You should make it easy to do so, and you should make it so that it’s easy for consumers, or else they’re not going to do it.

Designing to be Reused 

A more difficult concept is basically reusing this. This is less about tearing away and getting rid of items, but it creates different packaging that actually shows that it can be sterilized and washed once again.

You need the infrastructure to wash, sterilize, and  collect then return this again. It's basically a new variant of the milkman.

While there have been attempts a lot in cosmetics and personal care, loop is basically not perfect. But the thing is, it’s actually attractive for a lot of businesses, as it looks at the life cycle assessment.

If you’re going to do this, you need to make sure that you have an item that isn’t actually bulky and heavy, because it reduces the benefits and the impact on this actually makes it worse.  You need to make the reuse process easy as well and lower the energies necessary.

Using bioplastics 

This is a replacement for fossil fuels. A lot of people think bioplastics are biodegradable, or are compostable, but that’s not totally true. 

While these bioplastics are good substitutes, the usage of them may cause problems with the environment, and it reduces the footprint, while boosting acidification as well. This is usually the water footprint, and other sorts of impacts.

Another thing too, is that bioplastics will not fix the plastic problem, but only alleviate it.  if a whale eats a bioplastic, it can still die.

There is also the issue of the supply, and you may wonder if that’s possible. Some ways to fix this is to improve the production of agriculture of feedstock and sugar cane, and this is something that can be pushed to the limits to get the land to compete with the production of food. Deforestation is not a good solution though.

The best way to fix this is R&D investments, and you should only use biomass waste that doesn’t come with other applications.

Not to mention, there are other issues that come with this too. We may replace plastic with paper, but this creates a supply problem, and it doesn’t really fix the carbon footprint, or acidification of this. 

We still have a huge loss of forests around the world, and a lot of times, we have to expand to take on more waste. It’s important to monitor this.

While not perfect, we’re looking to fix the current ecological stress, and hopefully, with the right decisions, this is possible to do so.