Which materials for sustainable packaging?
When discussing sustainable packaging, the choice of material is often one of the first question asked. And in the age of environmental awareness, conscious consumers and engaged brands tend to incline towards material that have a green image like paper or glass. But the reality is that it’s not that simple and clearcut.
Materials chosen for packaging indeed play a crucial role in the sustainability of the solution – however many other considerations must be taken into account. So, to the question “what material should I select?” the answer is always “it depends.”
Here we try to provide a synthetic view of the benefits and limitations of the most used packaging materials, and of their recommended / not recommended uses.
Spoiler alert 1: there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ material, all materials have their benefits and their limitations, and it’s all about what material is used for what purpose.
Spoiler alert 2: there is no silver bullet either, a ‘magical material’ that would solve all needs! Each choice comes with a ‘price to pay’, and the role of brands is to make informed arbitrations towards a balanced solution, in coherence with the brand’s values and philosophy – and to communicate in a transparent and honest way about those choices.
Packaging materials benchmark
BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS
#1 GLASS
Glass is highly regarded as a sustainable material, essentially because it has the reputation of being indefinitely recyclable. This is partly true as in fact what we actually do is downcycling: ultra-flint glass used for luxury perfume bottles for example can accept only a modest percentage of post-consumer recycled (PCR) material (15-40%) before showing a greenish hue. So in reality glass is gradually downcycled into less 'noble' applications, from white glass, to green (wine bottles...), to brown (beer bottles...), and to filling for road surfaces or glass fibers for insulation.
Hence the whole process requires a constant influx of virgin material.
But perhaps the biggest issue about glass is that it requires a lot of energy to be fused, making it a high contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and Global warming.
