March 29. 2024. 2:20

The Daily

Read the World Today

Innovation is the key to cutting packaging waste


Good regulation is critical to supporting business-driven innovation. This will ensure we have the conditions and support that enable Europe’s businesses, to invest, innovate and produce goods and services, which have the highest environmental, economic, and social benefits.

Today, Europe is discussing the proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and how we maintain the many documented benefits packaging delivers, (including product protection, safety, hygiene, accessibility, and affordability), while further limiting the amount of packaging materials that are not recovered, recycled, or reused. Taking a systemic approach to achieve a functioning circular economy is required both to deliver on the Green Deal and to ensure unintended consequences are identified and avoided. Innovation is a key part of how we achieve all these objectives and deliver regenerative value.

Good regulation is critical to supporting business-driven innovation. Not only does it rely on the sciences, but it also requires the resources of both people and investment. Innovation also benefits from stability and legal certainty, and from the competitive edge that the Single Market has provided.

As a company, we recently updated our ambitious 2030 strategy, of which innovation is a key component. The reason is that sustainability and innovation go together if we want to drive a systemic change, from using renewable or recycled content to secure products end-of-life recycling. While much of our packaging portfolio can already be recycled, an area of technical challenge has been lightweight flexible packaging, which although delivering huge benefits – reducing transport emissions, preventing food waste, and supporting affordability – was typically not recyclable in today’s post-consumer recovery streams.

By using our global scientific expertise, we are this week launching three unique and powerful sustainable solutions in mono-material flexible packaging. Our breakthrough innovations set new industry standards. They are designed for recycling and use fewer materials than the conventional complex and multi-layered materials they are designed to replace. What makes our innovation unique and transformative is the combination of the highest percentage of mono-material in the market today and the fact that this is delivered without any compromise on product protection while maintaining affordability. And, by increasing the percentage of mono-material in each of our solutions, we are increasing both the technical and economic viability of recycling. We have already made ambitious investments into new production technologies in key sites to bring these solutions to global markets at scale.

We will continue our path to developing sustainable solutions in packaging to ensure that consumers everywhere have the same access to safe, hygienic, and affordable food. To get there, we’ll continue to work with partners to deliver systemic change across our value chain.

One important enabler to a systemic change is to raise enabling legislations, which motivates everyone in society to play their full part – innovate for circularity, promote renewable sources and recycling, help develop collection and recycling infrastructures, invest in education, and behave responsibly. Of course, it could be so different if policymakers always choose this comprehensive route. Instead, it has unfortunately become more common to develop restrictive regulations and bans without the use of thorough impact assessments and without applying the Innovation Principle. Such bans take resources away from the focus on innovation, making Europe less competitive, less green and with the potential to make achieving our climate ambitions more challenging.

What Europe needs is innovation. That requires policymakers to have an unwavering commitment to evidence and science as part of Better Regulation. This will ensure we have the conditions and support that enable Europe’s businesses, including our own, to invest, innovate and produce goods and services, which have the highest environmental, economic, and social benefits. It is time for that commitment to be renewed.