Global sustainable packaging paper released

The World Packaging Organisation (WPO) has released a paper titled ‘Sustainability perspectives across the globe’.

Nerida Kelton, WPO Vice President Sustainability & Save Food, said the document is the result of recent discussions in 21 WPO member countries about trends, barriers, challenges and initiatives within their regions. The countries are Finland, Austria, Italy, Poland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, United States, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, Israel, India, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.

“What is interesting is that the sentiment is the same in every corner of the globe. Whilst a lot is happening in circular and sustainable design, a lot more needs to be done to realistically be able to meet packaging and waste targets globally, regionally and locally,” Kelton said.

According to Kelton, common themes that each country shared were designing out waste at the start, eliminating problematic materials, phasing out single-use plastics, incorporating more recycled content into product and ensuring that materials put out into the market are capable of recyclability and circularity.

The WPO member countries are developing key initiatives and programs to address this, including:

• Moving soft plastics and flexible packaging to material formats that are recyclable via existing infrastructure.
• Developing extended producer responsibility regulations.
• Establishing plastics pacts and roadmaps for the country or region.
• Creating deposit return schemes/container deposit schemes.
• Building facilities for recycled content.
• Establishing regulations for single-use plastics.
• Improving materials recovery facility capabilities and technologies.
• Building advanced/chemical recycling facilities.
• Developing consumer education on recycling.
• Creating package-labelling programs to guide recycling.

Pierre Pienaar, WPO President, said the organisation offers a platform to bring countries together for discussion.

Pienaar said the Sustainability & Save Food group can help countries share knowledge and implement programs, enabling a clearer view of what needs to be done to meet global, regional and local packaging and waste targets.

“Everyone has a role to play to ensure that packaging is being designed to provide the lowest environmental impacts wherever possible and that the materials and formats are fit for purpose, functional and truly capable of being collected, sorted, recycled and reprocessed in the country that it is sold in,” Kelton said.

Image credit: iStock.com/Iryna Mylinska