The 10th annual Food Packaging Forum (FPF) workshop “Taking stock of the past decade: What has changed and what’s to come?” took place in Zurich, Switzerland on October 6, 2022. Participants joined both in-person and online. This article summarizes the presentations given and panels held during the afternoon of the workshop around the theme of visions for more sustainable food packaging and what needs yet to be done to make that a reality. Recordings of the presentations by individual speakers are available online. There is an additional article focusing on the morning sessions reviewing how regulations have changed in the last ten years and what changes are needed.
“Information is useless.” With this short statement Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network (GFN), quickly woke up workshop attendees after lunch. After a short pause he concluded, “… unless it’s empowering.” He used ’An Inconvenient Truth’, the film developed by Al Gore, as an example. The inconvenient truth of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is that “the more you know the worse you’re off. The more you know the more you have to give up… for this anonymous ‘humanity’.”
Wackernagel challenged workshop participants to consider, “if we want to make information transformative, how do we tell the story so it is empowering?” He follows his own advice in his work at GFN, changing his narrative in the last few years. GFN used to tell people to think about “decreasing their footprint” but now uses a more empowering idea: “increase your resource security.” By highlighting that there are things individuals, businesses, and countries can do to increase their future security and access to resources, Wackernagel makes his work more relevant to everyday concerns, “can you afford not to be ready for the predictable future?”
Wackernagel focused on the global use of resources while the following panelists applied these idea to the food service industry and food system. Julie Cachat, associate at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Joan-Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe; and Martijn Sonnevelt, executive director of the ETH Zurich World Food System Center funneled Wackernagel’s big ideas to the specific packaging related themes of the workshop. Specifically, creating a vision for safer and more sustainable food packaging.
All three agreed on the point that we cannot continue as we are in order to make the vision of safe and sustainable food packaging a reality. For Cachat, companies are in the driver’s seat. That’s why they need common goals and a common language to make the change. She mentioned the SPHERE packaging sustainability framework as an approach in this direction. While Simon stressed that we also need to challenge the business models of companies and that a systems perspective is needed. For example, more circularity and recycling can contribute to safer and more sustainable food packaging, but it is clearly not enough to make the change (FPF reported). He sees himself and his organization as facilitator in this process. Sonnevelt highlighted that in order to have a perspective on sustainable food packaging, one must consider the entire sustainable food system. This includes breaking down existing silos in order to facilitate truly transdisciplinary work.
Echoing Wackernagel, Simon responded to a question about new EU transparency laws that “we put too much faith on information alone.” Information needs context to be useful. To increase the creativity for good solutions he suggests to bring more boundaries into the system. On the question how a win-win situation for affected parties (including industry) could look like, Sonnevelt responded that there is no silver-bullet for this. From his own experience, however, he is convinced that it helps to co-create programs and projects from the start in order to be more application oriented and to also have the industry defining some of the topics. This takes a lot of time. Cachat added that this is not easy but that it is essential to include industry collaboration. This leads back to a first statement she made, which is that companies have no choice but to take more action because we are all headed in the same direction which is why we need to make the transformation to sustainable food packaging.
Throughout the day scientists and regulators discussed many policy and research developments to make safer and sustainable packaging. But what can that look like in practice? Tobias Bielenstein, director of public affairs, sustainability & communications of the Cooperative of the German Mineral Water Companies (Genossenschaft Deutscher Brunnen) shared how drinks producers in Germany jointly manage a reuse system that has a nearly universal acceptance rate among the German public – 99.4% of reusable bottles are returned in Germany. Bielenstein drew attention to the fact that it is not only the packaging, but the entire system that is affected when considering reuse.
When discussing a reuse system there are a lot of questions to consider: Does the system use branded bottles or non-branded bottles? Is the system managed or unmanaged? The cooperative itself works in a jointly managed system with standardized bottles that consumers return to the store where they purchased it. A glass bottle in their system is used up to 50 times and returnable PET plastic bottles can be used 20 times.
“To the consumer, it has to be as simple as possible” Bielenstein explains. But, do all participating businesses in the system want to use the same bottles as their competitors? He pointed out that individualization is also possible in a reuse system, since a standardized bottle is not equal to a uniform bottle. Even with the same clear bottle to work with there are differences in beverage color, labels, and caps which easily brand who made the drink.
A standardized reuse system “is doable on the same cost level” as a single use bottle, but the systems’ cost structures are different. Bielenstein also rhetorically asked if reuse always performs better in terms of an life cycle assessment (LCA). LCAs, he says, are often misused in politics to emphasize a particular point of view or perspective. But Bielenstein argues, they should be used to figure out what we can do better.
Regardless of the type of system we run, we need to get it right, Bielenstein believes. As efficient and with the fewest impacts as possible, from a lifecycle perspective. Stressing this point, he said “whatever you do, a single-use glass bottle can never be sustainable even if its fully recycled. It’s too heavy, it’s too much energy to use it.” Which is confirmed by all LCA studies on the subject, “no matter who ordered it.” Bielenstein ended his talk by answering a question about success factors that make the presented reuse system in Germany work. Among other things, he pointed out that the system makes sense and that as long as the people of the participating companies understand why it makes sense, companies will cooperate and participate.
In the final panel of the day Dagny Tucker founder of Vessel, and Sian Sutherland co-founder of A Plastic Planet discussed some of the challenges brought up by others in the workshop and how to take what had been discussed today into future change. Sutherland was quick to highlight her belief that the “juicy burger of industry” holds much of the responsibility for incorporating the messages of the day into their products. And how to do that one might ask? Sutherland argued “we need the creative industry… How can we empower 160 million global creatives” to take on these challenges?
But what can these global creatives work with and what will consumers be left with? So many conversations around the topic of “sustainability” focus on doing without – avoiding materials or chemicals or certain processes. Panel moderator Jean-Paul Judson asked “will choice still prevail?” Like Bielenstein’s point that a standardized, shared bottle does not equal a uniform product, Tucker argued that “limitation isn’t always constriction.”
Tucker continues that “we’re really challenged with this conflict of goals between climate change and human health,” she uses lightweighting as an example. Lightweighting is exactly what it sounds like, reducing the weight of packaging. Many companies are concerned about the carbon emissions from transportation so they work to lower the weight of the packaging, they may do something like switch from glass to plastic or from a single-polymer plastic to a blend of materials. But switching to complex non-inert materials can increase exposure to synthetic chemical migration. Sutherland agreed with Tucker’s concerns, “we have to work harder to connect climate, carbon and plastic.” But she also believes, “I think we hugely overestimate how much we need to communicate to the consumer… It’s always going to come back to ‘we have to change the business model.’ …This is about reinventing… we need to rethink everything in a way that puts us into the slipstream of nature.”
Read more
Mathis Wackernagel (October 6, 2022). “From sustainability to regeneration: Which numbers count?” YouTube
Tobias Bielenstein (October 6, 2022). “Making safe and sustainable packaging work in the real world: A case study on reusable packaging.” YouTube
FPF (October 6, 2022). “2022 Workshop: Taking stock of the past decade: What has changed and what’s to come?”
