More one-way bottles, small packaging, increasing online trade and an increasing trend towards ready-made and to-go products: an estimated 226.5 kilograms of packaging per person end up in the garbage every year. Ascending trend? Because while plastic packaging waste alone has doubled in the last 25 years, the desire for environmentally friendly packaging is also increasing among more and more manufacturers and end consumers. A pretty, eye-catching design is no longer enough for a product to get from the shelf to the shopping cart. In the following article, you can find out what makes environmentally friendly packaging and which raw materials are suitable for it. We also give you tips for sustainable packaging options in gastronomy, in retail and on your own four walls.
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What is sustainable packaging?
Environmentally friendly packaging consists of a renewable and recyclable raw material that leaves the smallest possible CO2 footprint in its processing. Lean production processes, short delivery routes or lower material costs make it possible for sustainable packaging to use fewer resources and thus less impact on the environment.
At the same time, however, the environmentally friendly packaging must also contain information on the product itself (e.g. the list of ingredients) and protect the goods adequately during manufacture, storage, transport and sale and comply with hygiene regulations. The particular challenge: the sustainable raw material should ideally not be coated or lavishly printed during processing for packaging. This is the only way to use packaging for as long as possible and recycle it again. Take bag soups. For example, the individual packages are made of paper but are printed with aluminum and polyethene. This makes the recycling process very difficult, and the individual materials cannot always be separated from one another.
In the packaging of other products, however, something has happened in recent years: yoghurt pots, for example, are now increasingly being offered with a paper coating. It contains all information about the product and can be separated at a perforated edge. Paper and cups can then be recycled separately.
Sustainable packaging materials explanation of terms
Sustainable organic packaging more and more packaging is being declared as "biodegradable" or "made from renewable raw materials". These instructions can even be read on plastic packaging. But, first, we'll explain what it's all about.
Degradable
If material is degradable, it only means that it will eventually break down into smaller parts. This also applies to plastic, which becomes micro plastic.
Biodegradable: If material is biodegradable, microorganisms can break it down into components that occur in nature, such as carbon dioxide and water. However, this can also be fossil raw materials such as crude oil. How long this process takes is irrelevant. All-natural materials such as wood or cotton are biodegradable. However, this does not mean that packaging labeled as biodegradable can be thrown into nature or disposed of inorganic waste. Biodegradable plastics must be disposed of in the yellow bin.
Compostable
According to the EU standard EN 13432, packaging can be labelled as compostable if at least 90 per cent of it can be broken down into compost in an industrial composting facility within three months. Compostable materials are therefore biodegradable, but the reverse is not always true.
So that the materials can be broken down into compost. Certain conditions are necessary, such as a specific temperature that prevails in composting plants but not on the compost heap in the garden. Garbage bags are declared as compostable, and another plastic packaging must therefore neither be disposed of on the compost nor in the organic waste bin. Like all other plastics, they belong in the yellow bin.
Bioplastic packaging plastic
These terms are not legally secured and not uniformly defined. Bio-plastics can consist of renewable raw materials and be biodegradable, but do not have to be. If necessary, only one of these characteristics applies. According to the environmental organization WWF, there is currently no unique recycling process for biodegradable and compostable plastics in USA. Instead, bags and other waste from this sector are sorted out and incinerated in the organic waste recycling plant.
Bio based from renewable raw materials
This note means that the material was made from vegetable raw materials. It can also be biodegradable or compostable, but that doesn't have to be the case here either. That depends on how the raw material was processed. Packaging made from renewable raw materials is also not necessarily particularly sustainable. Because it may be, for example, that forests were cut down to extract the raw materials.
Three reasons why more and more manufacturers (should) rely on environmentally friendly packaging:
Less packaging waste in the supermarket manufacturers and retailers are obliged by the EU circular economy package and the packaging law to work on new packaging solutions. They control the amount of packaging waste that is in circulation and stipulate increasing recycling rates.
More and more manufacturers are working on environmentally conscious packaging solutions, not only due to legal obligations but also to achieve their own sustainability goals in the company.
The demand for products with ecological packaging is increasing. In 2019, 91 percent of USA consumers said that they would like more goods without plastic packaging. If manufacturers meet this trend, this positively influences branding and the competitive advantage over the competition increases.
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