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July 22, 2024 Opinion & Commentary

Sustainable packaging: From aspiration to bold action

Omar Asali
By Omar Asali

E-commerce giant Amazon in June announced its largest reduction in plastic packaging to date.

Amazon has largely removed plastic air pillows from its packaging in North America, and by the end of this year expects to eliminate plastic altogether and shift to paper packaging materials.

That’s tens of millions of pounds of single-use plastic film that won’t end up in the homes of Amazon customers, that won’t clog our waterways, and that won’t occupy landfills for the duration of our children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes.

There is no doubt that the corporate world has experienced a seismic shift in consumer and societal expectations toward the adoption of more sustainable business practices over the past decade. A recent study cited that Gen-Z consumers value sustainability over brand names, while regulators have been hard at work designing laws to encourage the use (and penalize the nonuse) of sustainable practices.

The conversation is lively, the momentum is strong, and yet most businesses only announce lofty sustainability goals as marketing tools with continuously shifting and dubious future timelines.

At first glance, it can be hard to see past the challenges of these aspirations. Retooling your lines, or redesigning your products to incorporate more sustainable materials while maintaining their original integrity? That’s complex, expensive and time-consuming.

Reducing the overall greenhouse gas emissions that your business produces? Also, very difficult. But among businesses that ship products — whether business-to-consumer, business-to-business, e-commerce or brick and mortar — adopting more sustainable solutions to protect products in shipment is a no-brainer.

More sustainable packaging alternatives with comparable cost and performance have been available for years, but we continue to hear a lot of talk, with very little action.

The potential environmental impact of choosing sustainable packaging alternatives over plastic is invaluable. Packaging is estimated to account for a walloping 50% of all plastic waste generated. The fact that so many businesses have been slow to transition away from single-use plastic packaging is unfortunate and has had detrimental consequences for our planet.

It is now visible that our world is literally drowning in plastic waste. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), we generated 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste from 1950 to 2015, and currently leak approximately 20 million metric tons of plastic waste each year into our lakes, rivers and seas.

If that weren’t bad enough, an Australian study recently concluded that the average person ingests one credit card of plastic each week. Looking forward, the Ellen McArthur Foundation reports that by 2050, there could be more plastic by weight than fish in the sea. And while we know that packaging is an enormous contributor to that problem, it’s a solvable part of the problem.

Of course, eliminating plastic packaging would not eliminate 50% of all plastic waste. Some products and packaging applications require plastic.

But eliminating plastic packaging whenever possible is the low-hanging fruit in our collective effort to reduce plastic waste.

It doesn’t require an R&D team to develop new materials, or a development team to fully redesign a product. It doesn’t mean that consumers need to familiarize themselves with new product experiences, or new ways of recycling (i.e., think paper bags or straws). The fact is, we need our business leaders to move beyond aspiration and take bold action.

Deeds, not words.

Amazon’s recent announcement is the clearest indication yet that this constellation of factors is finally tipping the scales. As a market leader, Amazon will no doubt set a new standard that we hope other companies will follow.

There are watershed moments in life, and this might be one of them. Broad awareness can lead to big actions.

The transition from single-use plastic packaging to sustainable packaging materials is not a banal nice-to-have. It is a corporate responsibility that should be acted upon with urgency.

Omar Asali is the CEO and chairman of Ranpak, a manufacturer of sustainable packaging materials with a facility in Shelton.

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