How to plan and apply packaging sustainability to your products while avoiding greenwashing to succeed in today’s market and future sale markets.

The pet food industry, like food and beverage and CPG sectors, are setting sustainability goals, many by 2025. Packaging protects the pet food’s shelf life and taste characteristics. Planning your packaging options with awareness of the packaging material’s lifecycle and circular recovery path will give the producers and the buyers environmentally sound choices that will help them avoid options that are considered greenwashing, or materials that will end up in a landfill vs. more sustainable options like recycling or composting to reuse the material(s).

Sustainable packaging is important to me, because I would like to leave a better footprint and impact in the packaging field and the world around us. For CRB it is important to stay up to date with the trends as an industry steward to be able to help our clients with sustainable choices.

The world is good at recycling paper, glass, and metals. The circularity development of plastics outside of HDPE and PP are the next big change. Building the infrastructure and the knowledge of the public on how and where to recycle is important. The chasing arrows around a number does not indicate that it is recyclable, it just clarifies the type of plastic resin used. Being able to separate the resins and reuse them as primary barriers again will be important to the lifecycle of plastics that are oil based and the impact to our environment.

Being able to identify the right materials for function, use/ reuse/ recycle for our products across all industries is very important for sustainable living now and for our future generations. I hope that composting industrially and at home may also be growing with the proper infrastructure and science behind what actually breaks down and will not affect us and our environment with sugar/starch-based polymer plastics, water-based inks and coatings. I hope there is more research done to understand how and what we make impacts us as humans and our environment so we can help eliminate the sources and causes of detrimental effects to our bodies, our environment, animals, and eco system.