As regulations and consumer attitudes are changing and increasingly favouring more sustainable packaging choices, now is the time to assess whether your business can modify its packaging accordingly.
In recent months, an increasing number of brands have announced changes to their packaging to include more recycled content or improve its recyclability. With consumer attention becoming more and more focused on the sustainability of packaging, and the incoming Plastic Packaging Tax adding extra financial pressure, it's important not to get left behind.
Factors to consider
Food and beverage manufacturers have a lot of different factors to balance when thinking about packaging design. As well as obviously protecting the product as efficiently as possible and keeping costs down, there is the pressure to make the packaging sustainable and recyclable, all whilst ensuring it looks attractive to consumers.
Expert advice
Veolia can take some of that stress away. Our Sustainable Packaging Academy can assess your current packaging and make suggestions to improve its recyclability, by testing its design either in the lab or in a large scale trial, to identify areas where improvements can be made. We can help you choose more sustainable packaging materials, which will still fulfil the requirements you need.
We can also perform Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to keep you informed about the environmental impact of different packaging designs, to try and reduce the environmental impact as much as possible. On a more practical level, we can supply you with recycled materials to use in packaging. This can help you prepare for the Plastic Packaging Tax, as you will get stung if your plastic packaging does not contain at least 30% recycled plastic.
Transparent process
Of course, it's not just how your packaging is produced that determines how sustainable it is - what happens at the end of its life can be another area for concern. For example, products made from PET, such as ready meal trays, can be difficult to recycle due to not being picked up by optical sorting machines. Veolia's dual PET (Poly Ethylene Terephthalate) bottle and tray recycling facility will help by making 'bottle to bottle' or 'tray to tray' recycling possible.
It can also be challenging to educate end-users about how to dispose of your packaging correctly, especially if it is traditionally seen as general waste. Our ProCycle solution can help with this, as we can develop bespoke recycling routes for your packaging, and allow consumers to recycle materials which have traditionally been seen as difficult to recycle. Thinking about both ProCycle and our recycling processes more broadly, we ensure everything is recycled in the UK and can provide complete transparency to you and your customers about what happens to your recycled packaging.
