Looking Ahead

The sustainability issue

The final keynote presentation on the opening day of the conference was a view of the sustainability agenda from a major multinational end user. Steph Carter, packaging sustainability director at Unilever, made a strong case for sustainability metrics, discussing what, how, and why every company should embark on such a procedure. “Until you have the measures,” he said, “you can’t set the targets.” He spoke on the currently popular myth that reductions in packaging are the answers to everything. “Packaging typically has about 10 percent of the environmental impacts of its content,” he said. “It preserves and protects far more than it impacts.” When selecting packaging for specific applications, he suggested that “it is wrong to choose materials simply because they have the lowest impacts, or are perceived to be ‘green’. Choose them for function and their real impacts—not the perceptions.” He cautioned that release liners—like any aspect of product processing that the consumer does not see—are likely to become a bigger issue in the consumer arena in the future.