The sustainable packaging bandwagon is gathering momentum, and most food and beverage companies are on board.
Sustainability may be a frustratingly vague and hard to define term, but it’s getting harder to find anyone in corporate America who is against it.Not only is sustainability joining mom and apple pie on our favorite-things list, formal plans of action are being put into place by packaging engineers and other food company professionals. Three-fifths of Food Engineering readers polled in this year’s Packaging Trends Survey indicated a formal sustainability plan was in place at their companies. Driven partly by the sustainable packaging initiative launched last year by Wal-Mart, 59% indicated they had adopted a plan. Efforts to reduce waste streams and energy usage were the most frequently cited actions taken, followed by efforts to reduce transportation costs and cut back on both primary and secondary packaging.Reuse of secondary packaging was the sixth most-common sustainable practice, though only 13% of companies were reusing materials, far less than those using other tactics. Use of more sustainable packaging materials, in-store stocking and other actions also were mentioned.