The Sustainable Packaging Coalition is the largest North American organization striving to move packaging in a more sustainable direction. Six hundred plus member companies, non-governmental organizations and government groups gathered in San Francisco in April 2022. Off-site day trips combined with multiple speakers, break-out sessions, and networking to provide a 3-day educational experience to motivate, to challenge and to inspire attendees to move their organizations towards sustainability.
A consistent theme throughout the conference was the need to close loops. Closing loops involves intercepting items at the disposal stage to feed them back into the creation of a new product. No waste is the goal. The waste for one process becomes a feedstock for another in a circular system.
Closed loops take a wide variety of forms. Bottle deposit programs, recycling in curbside bins and composting are a common means to recover products at the end of life to avoid landfills. Each business has its own closed loop systems to discover. Anything a company ships or currently landfills can be a potential source for circularity. Closing loops takes collaboration.
Collaboration can take a multitude of partners including clients, vendors, and the government. An example of collaboration to enable circularity of organic materials is California state bill 1383. The bill sets a target to reduce disposal of organic waste in landfills, including edible food. The goal is to reduce statewide organic waste by 75% by January 2025.
The bill addresses key statistics.
- forty percent of food is wasted
- approximately 1 in 4 Californians are struggling with food insecurity
- food waste accounts for 8% of global emissions (food waste in landfills creates methane and carbon dioxide)
State bill 1383 includes a few general mandates.
- Qualifying food service businesses must donate edible food to food recovery organizations.
- Organics are to be separated, collected, and turned into compost.
- Municipalities must procure compost to each person in each municipality. The composter has a market to sell their compost.
The policy helps feed the hungry, enables the composting industry to grow, prevents greenhouse gas emissions and diverts organics away from the landfill.
The policy ties municipalities, food service businesses, consumers, composters, and the state government together to tackle food shortages and emissions.
The collaboration guided by policy allows the organics loop a better chance to be closed in California. In practice, it is not easy as many things must align for the intended policy to take full effect. It takes a long time.
Packaging can do a lot to aid in reducing food waste.
- Printing on the package ideas of what to do with leftovers, how to dispose of organics and the impact of organics in landfills informs the consumer.
- Reclosable packaging features provide for ease in using more of the contents over time.
- Material makeup can elongate shelf life without impacting end of life recovery streams.
- At times, more packaging can prevent food waste. For example, a wheel of cheese sold in bulk has a high chance of not being fully consumed. That same block packaged in 6 to 8 “pie shaped” packages can be consumed in smaller lots without affecting the larger amounts shelf life. There is an environmental tradeoff off food waste verse amount packaging. Each situation mandates looking at the tradeoffs to determine which alternative offers a better environmental choice.
Walking away from the conference, closing loops in ways we can are what we are all called to do. Closing loops requires innovation in material choice and in supply chains and collaboration with others
The streets of San Francisco are often steep. Crazy steep. It is like walking up a black diamond rated downhill skiing trail. At the heights of these streets you can find breathtaking views of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. The sustainability journey can feel like walking the streets of San Francisco: A steep climb to treasure of clean air, clean water, and clean land.