In case you’re tuned into company sustainability, you most likely hear corporations discuss net-zero targets on a regular basis. You most likely additionally hear corporations discuss efforts to stop plastic air pollution and enhance packaging recyclability. However how usually do you hear corporations attempt to hyperlink these efforts collectively?
It’s an enormous missed alternative. Packaging waste and carbon emissions are two sides of the identical coin — the supplies used for transport and disposal carry a carbon price throughout its life cycle. Understanding this connection is essential for making significant progress on each fronts.
Whereas the sustainable packaging neighborhood has been busy setting sustainability objectives to hit recycling or sustainable sourcing targets, it may really feel just like the business has forgotten the place these objectives are alleged to take us: to a world the place we now have carbon emissions and waste beneath management.
Understanding packaging’s contribution to carbon emissions
Packaging, as most of us know, closely contributes to the local weather disaster.
In 2019, plastics contributed extra emissions than the aviation and delivery industries mixed. Based on the OECD, the availability chain of plastics generated 3.4 % of all international greenhouse gasoline emissions, and 90 % of this got here from manufacturing and conversion from fossil fuels.
If plastics have been a rustic, they might have the fifth-largest share of world emissions as of 2022, slightly below China, the U.S., India and Russia. Though many plastics go into merchandise that aren’t packaging, if we take a look at the remainder of the packaging worth chain — glass, aluminum, fiber, bioplastics — the whole carbon footprint of packaging could be even bigger.
Proper now, the results of packaging’s waste and carbon emissions are handled in siloes. Waste is framed as a air pollution downside, carbon as a local weather one — and corporations are left to piece collectively fragmented methods as a substitute of unified options. However we will deal with local weather change by utilizing sustainable packaging efforts via the next methods.
Fold your packaging objectives and wins into your local weather technique
Too usually, sustainable packaging does the exhausting work of decarbonizing with out getting credit score for it. It’s time to vary that. Lowering packaging materials avoids emissions, and this must be counted in the direction of emissions targets. Redesigning packaging in order that it doesn’t go to landfills is a win on your carbon objectives, too.
Embedding packaging objectives and calculations into your local weather technique is step one. In case you don’t know the place to start out, use Life Cycle Evaluation instruments and packaging calculators to calculate the averted emissions of a packaging change.
Make it clear — to colleagues, shoppers and buyers — how your packaging efforts are a part of your local weather technique. Unilever’s Scope 3 GHG discount plan, for instance, reveals how packaging helps them to satisfy their 2030 goal of decreasing absolute Scope 3 emissions by 30-40 %.
Suppose otherwise about tradeoffs
Proper now, once we design packaging to be recyclable and the change creates extra emissions, that is referred to as a tradeoff. Corporations really feel they’ve to choose one route, and primarily based on strain from shoppers, they usually select recyclability. If a bundle has no good end-of-life choice however a decrease carbon footprint (like a not but recyclable plastic bag, for instance), that is thought-about one other unlucky, however needed tradeoff.
As a substitute, what if we thought of tradeoffs like we take into consideration flying with a layover? Layovers aren’t your closing vacation spot — they’re only a typically needed cease alongside the best way. Making short-term sustainability tradeoffs is a layover on our path towards a future with decreased waste and carbon emissions in packaging.
Corporations don’t have to attend to deal with each crises, both. Already, corporations similar to Prana are adopting practices — similar to utilizing seaweed-based compostable packaging — to deal with each waste and carbon emissions.
Go for the large swings
What’s the only largest swing corporations can take to deal with each local weather and packaging waste? Discount. Whereas switching to a “higher” single-use materials — renewable feedstock or recycled content material — could appear to be a step ahead, it’s finally solely an incremental change.
The way forward for sustainable packaging hinges on whether or not corporations actually perceive and embrace the significance of discount and system redesign. By decreasing the quantity of packaging used within the first place and redesigning packaging to be reusable or refillable, corporations can considerably decrease useful resource use, carbon emissions and environmental affect. And you’ll take consolation understanding that your organization received’t be the primary to do that. Corporations similar to beverage big Diageo are already discovering methods to scale round, reusable packaging.
Proper now, we’re losing our time in transit. If we meet these alternatives — by folding our packaging and local weather objectives collectively, rethinking tradeoffs and taking huge swings — we’ll attain that future with decreased waste and carbon emissions.
For extra on decreasing and eliminating waste within the international financial system, keep tuned for Circularity 2025 beginning Tuesday.
