Everyone who participates in the modern economy understands that packaging needs to be improved, right?
Honestly, I get frustrated when it takes 10 minutes to get a kid’s toy out of the package. After extraction, I have the pleasure of scrutinizing every component to see if it’s recyclable (note: If I have to examine, it’s usually not recyclable). I don’t even want to think about what the average consumer does with toy packaging. I’m sure it’s horrifying.
Then there are people like the other 600 attendees at the可持续包装联盟（SPC）影响会议，本月初在旧金山举行。这群人了解包装。他们知道为什么一瓶止痛药在盒子里出售，即使瓶子保护了物品，他们知道为什么我刚刚订购的尿布盒子放在另一个盒子里，围绕着它包裹着空气枕头（只是开玩笑，没有人知道这个. It’s bonkers).
Recycling and composting alone will not build the circular economy, but you can’t build a circular economy without them. It is clear from SPC Impact that the packaging industry knows this. Let’s quickly touch on three points that I heard at the conference.
Mechanical recycling is very much part of the solution today, and is likely to be for quite some time. The focus is on better collection and separation technologies through innovations such asdigital watermarks,artificial intelligenceand robotic sorting. This will make the output of the mechanical recycling process higher quality and usable in more applications.
堆肥设施不断地应对双重挑战separating contaminants从有机材料和有利可图。堆肥空间中的主要参与者开始在其设施中使用AI和机器人技术，并取得了巨大的成功。Atlas Organics, for example, is employing robots in its San Antonio facility and is confident it’ll be able to get to less than 1 percent contamination over time.
While packaging accounts for only a slice of total carbon emissions, there is an acknowledgement within the sector that packaging can have indirect carbon impacts in other sectors and that steps can be taken to decrease the impact further. Peter Spiller, partner at McKinsey, and Ruth Maust, project manager at GreenBlue, addressed these impacts in their decarbonization session. They discussed actions packaging players can take to better serve their customers and how innovation in packaging can help cut greenhouse gas emissions from a number of sectors. They also touched on how reducing packaging waste and use of smart packaging can reduce the impacts of the sector.
包装是消费者与您的品牌的首次互动。即使对公司的环境足迹的总体影响很小，也不要忽视这一点。
The main stage on day one of Impact also featured conversations on carbon. While not all of these presentations were directly related to packaging, the industry could find inspiration and a call to action in the discussions. If participants connected the dots between talks by Justin Freiberg, managing director at Yale Carbon Containment Lab, Matthew Realff, professor at Georgia Tech, and Freya Burton, chief sustainability officer at LanzaTech, they could start to think about how next generation packaging could be manufactured using "waste" carbon feedstocks captured directly from the air.
The team at GreenBlue agrees that climate change and waste reduction should be at the forefront of packaging innovation, and that they can go hand-in-hand. Goodrich made this clear when I asked about carbon emissions. "I would ask, why do we recycle? Why do we want circularity?" she said. "I hope it is because we want to reduce our carbon footprint. I understand there are other valuable reasons but the north star should be carbon."
In fact, GreenBlue’s recently published report,Guidance for Reusable Packaging, makes this argument clearly. Corporate sustainability goals should not be siloed, and efforts towards waste reduction and reuse should be integrally linked to carbon emissions reduction.
In summary
As David Eichberg, global head of climate strategy at HP, said on the main stage at Impact, "Packaging is a consumer’s first interaction with your brand. Don’t overlook that even if it is a small overall impact on your company’s environmental footprint."
如果您是品牌，包装生产商，或者基本上是经济中的其他任何人，请不要在包装上睡觉。A lot of folks out there are working to innovate in the space and those innovations are needed and overdue.
