Packaging as a Consumer Target

Public concerns over packaging are increasing.  Why?  In the wake of all the environmental news that surrounds consumers in their daily life, packaging is their most visible personal impact on the environment.  It accompanies almost everything they buy and inevitably ends up being the thing that most fills out their garbage bags.  

Consumers often perceive packaging as wasteful, inefficient and unnecessary.  In fact, in a recent Neilson survey, it was revealed that 40% of respondents were “very concerned” by trash from food packaging.  It seems that concern for packaging has increased more than any other environmental concern. 

Yet, packaging plays a number of extremely important functions.  Of course, the most obvious is product protection, which maximizes the life of a product, however less notice is given to packaging’s other important jobs. 
Some of those include:

• quality assurance
• consumer safety
• convenience
• consumer information
• tamper evidence
• product authenticity 
• patient compliance
• child resistance (for pharmaceuticals and toxic products)
• usability for seniors

The Packaging Paradox

While concerns over packaging increase, the desire for packaging features grows.  In the same Neilson survey cited above, 50% of consumers said they want to keep convenience packaging features (such as boxes, resealable containers or plastic packages also used during cooking etc.) and 70% of respondents indicated that they are interested in packaging that keeps food clean, ensure that it is untouched by other shoppers and/or which has instructions for cooking or use.  So, what does this mean?  Consumers generally consider packaging as useful, but are looking for guilt-free packaging.

Sustainability Silver Bullets

There are many popular avenues currently being pursued in the search for more sustainable packaging.
These include: 

• Biodegradable and compostable solutions;
• Using post consumer recycled content or renewable materials;
• Reducing the variety of materials used;
• Avoiding materials and chemicals such as PVC or polystyrene.

But, let’s take a closer look. Compostability is the ability for a package to quickly decompose in an ideal environment, yet only a tiny proportion of materials are actually composted given limited industrial composting facilities. Further, recycling is not always environmentally preferable to other options such as energy recovery, due to the impacts of collection and processing

Surprisingly, even the use of recycled materials might in fact be an inferior option to a non-recyclable package that uses far less materials.  Finally, social impacts such as food shortages leading to global riots have put the benefits of renewable materials such as bio-plastics in question. 

In short, there is no silver bullet. We can not put a label of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on materials, but instead look at appropriate and inappropriate applications.