“Sustainability” has become the cornerstone of many packaging-related conversations these days. There was a time when the words “packaging” and “environment” were scarcely joined by the same sentence. Those days, for many good reasons, are behind us.
Let’s look backward briefly. For generations, from the Industrial Revolution until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, most business leaders subscribed to the idea that the only mission of a business was to make a profit. Today, thankfully, most business leaders would feel rather uncomfortable admitting such shortsightedness.
Consumers and companies alike are now seeing that modifying packaging can accomplish three ends: it can save money, it benefits the environment and it helps people feel better about their choices.
Stories about the evolution of packaging pepper the news.
Recently the New York Times reported that Amazon has been crusading to have packagers adopt “frustration-free packaging” that eliminates, for example, plastic clamshells and bubble packaging – packaging components that irritate customers and make up a major source of complaints for the company.
So far, only 600 of the millions of products Amazon sells come in frustration-free versions. But Amazon, determined to get more manufacturers to use “frustration-free packaging,” is making the case by taking the angry customer feedback on old-school packages directly to the product makers. Compared to the traditional versions of the products, “frustration-free” products have earned on average a 73 percent reduction in negative feedback on the Amazon site.
This is really interesting. But change – no matter how quickly a company wants to move – is hard.
Stephen Lester, science director at the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a nonprofit environmental group, acknowledged this in the Times article.
“A lot of it is just the inertia of making changes,” he said. “Whenever you have a system set up to run your business, making any change means time and money.”
Or as Anne Johnson, the director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, said: “One of the biggest hurdles is to convince a company that it’s worthwhile, or the volume is there, to sell the same product in two different formats. You don’t end up with unified approaches to these issues, therefore you never solve these issues,” she said.
At PacMoore, we are keeping our finger on the pulse of this issue because we want to do the right thing and we know our clients (consumer packaged goods manufacturers, ingredients manufacturers, foodservice customers, and more) continually look to us for innovative and effective responses – solutions that will benefit us all.