Wrap It Right: Industry Associations Promote Green Initiatives

More and more, words such as “sustainability,” “green,” and “eco-friendly” are cropping up in the printing industry, and within the packaging sector specifically.

For packaging providers, the driving force behind the importance of the environment comes from many angles. Consumers are progressively more concerned with the environmental consequences of their purchases, so brands are prioritizing their ecological footprints, oftentimes resulting in changes to product packaging.

Additionally, as experts learn more about the impact of waste — including packaging waste — politicians work to implement legislation to curb the impact on taxpayers’ wallets, such as extended producer responsibility laws.

This can be complicated to navigate, which is why we spoke with experts from five packaging industry associations to learn how they are advocating for sustainability.

Cutting Through the Buzz

When sustainability is brought up by someone — or many someones — it can start to sound like a broken record. As such, those in the packaging industry must understand exactly what sustainability entails for them.

“Sustainability is providing the greenest packaging media,” says Michael D’Angelo, president of AICC, The Independent Packaging Association. “And by greenest, I’m saying the packaging media that can be most readily recycled or reused, can have several lives in terms of its reuse, and then has an end life.”

But “end life” doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t useful anymore.

“We have to design packaging appropriately so that we are utilizing the least amount of resources, the most recycled content, and ensure that those molecules stay in circulation — whatever molecule it is: fiber, polymer — rather than being discarded,” says Rosalyn Bandy, vice president of sustainability at TLMI. “It’s all about the health of our planet and the health of our human populations, our non-human populations, our ecosystem services. It all ties in together.”

Diving deeper, it’s important to recognize there are different ways to process packaging materials. Novel circularity systems are being developed to bring processing down to the molecular level. The challenge is figuring out how to scale these chemical recycling schemas large enough to bring curbside.

When it comes to sustainability in the packaging industry, circularity is of the utmost importance. | Credit: FPA

“They’ve already innovated and gotten a lot of sustainability benefits from flexible packaging, like the upstream benefits of reducing transportation, reducing weight, reducing energy and water use, and manufacturing,” says Alison Keane, president and CEO at the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA). “Now, they’ve got to figure out that last piece. How do you make it circular so that it gets collected, sorted, reprocessed, and made into another package or another sort of durable good?”

On the other hand, paper-based packaging solutions may have a more simplified path to circularity.

“The good news is … we always thought paper was good, but now we have actual data to talk about why it’s so important for us,” says Ben Markens, president of the Paperboard Packaging Council (PPC). “I think our members understand their responsibility, and we’re trying to make sure that people understand the circularity of fiber and what we do to get it back to the mill and processed into recovered fiber — which we do a really good job of — [and] made back into the recovered paperboard.”

While the health of people and the planet are of the utmost importance, there are other reasons to pursue sustainability.

“I always have to remind policymakers it’s not as if companies want to be using as much packaging as they can, because that doesn’t serve their bottom line,” says Dan Felton, executive director at AMERIPEN, an advocate for public policy across the whole packaging industry. “In addition to making a more sustainable world, they want to reduce [packaging] for cost purposes.”

With that understanding, let’s jump into the ways these associations are keeping sustainability front and center.

A Meeting of Minds

To help packaging providers meet their sustainability goals, a unified approach is key.

At PPC, Markens says they’ve established a sustainability task force, as well as a peer-to-peer network focused on innovating the packaging design process.

“We have what we call our Design & Innovation Community, which consists of members who are mostly customer-facing — that could be pure designers, it could be pure problem solvers, it could include the sales folks,” Markens says. “That’s a community that comes together through webinars and meetings to talk about what is best practice in design, or what does design-thinking mean.”

According to Bandy, TLMI’s sustainability initiatives are primarily handled by its Sustainability Committee. Within the committee are four subcommittees, which respectively deal with release liner recycling; keeping matrix byproducts out of landfills; providing sustainability resources to the organization’s members; and recognizing the sustainability efforts of its members.

In addition to the Sustainability Committee, TLMI’s Regulatory Affairs Committee keeps an eye on legislation, such as EPR laws, that affect the industry.

AMERIPEN also has its own member-based sustainability committee, which has been around for three years now. Felton says the committee is only second in popularity to its government affairs and policy committee.

Within the sustainability committee are three subcommittees, which respectively focus on sustainability across the packaging life cycle; promote the green initiatives of AMERIPEN members; and work to resolve the disconnect between packaging designers, brand owners, and the recycling market.

“If a packaging designer tries to make [packaging] more sustainable — what they believe is more sustainable — but at the end of the day, it can’t be recycled for some reason, that’s not a good end result,” Felton says. “So if we can have more dialogue between the designer and the person who’s going to deal with that material at the end of the life, that makes a more sustainable and circular economy.”

Education is King

Knowledge is power, so education reigns supreme.

For the in-person segment of AICC's first carbon neutrality workshop, Andrew Hurley, founder of the Packaging School, teaches participants at the 2023 AICC Annual Meeting. | Credit: AICC

AICC certainly lives by this, as the organization offers a wealth of educational opportunities. In summer 2023, AICC worked with the Greenville, South Carolina-based Packaging School to hold its first 30-hour, 12-week workshop on carbon neutrality. Participating AICC members learned how to speak about sustainability with customers and colleagues, as well as how to measure their carbon impact, says D’Angelo.

“If you’re looking to sell a box and a customer says, ‘What’s the carbon footprint of that box?’ you can answer it — where maybe box company B or box company C can’t answer it,” he notes. “And that could be the difference between getting the order or not.”

AICC is working to put together the second cohort now.

The organization also runs its Packaging University. The curriculum covers a range of corrugated-related information, such as leadership, production, safety, and, yes, sustainability. And there will be more sustainability courses added soon, D’Angelo says.

“We’re also working with the Packaging School to have a certificate of sustainability program,” he adds, “so that people can present themselves as somebody who has taken a course of study, then understands what sustainability means and how they can make a difference in their employer’s operations and in the fundamental well-being of the planet, which is what we’re all interested in.”

PPC’s TICCIT (pronounced “ticket”) program for school-aged kids educates the next generation about the renewability and sustainability of paperboard packaging. | Credit: PPC

On the consumer end, PPC runs an educational outreach program called TICCIT (pronounced “ticket”), which stands for “Trees Into Cartons, Cartons Into Trees.” The program teaches school-aged kids about paper and paperboard packaging, and debunks common misconceptions about sustainability.

“Our member companies take their associates — whether they’re in the factory or the office or wherever — and they go to their kids’ schools on or around Arbor Day with saplings and dirt, and usually a paperboard package that’s been organized to do that,” Markens says. “And they teach the kids about the benefits of paper-based packaging, and they play with dirt and they go home with a sapling and dirt. You can imagine, everybody wins. … It’s community engagement, it’s employee engagement, and it’s telling our story. So that’s a trifecta as far as we’re concerned.”

Better Together

When it comes to a topic like sustainability, lofty goals can be daunting. It’s no surprise, then, that collaboration is prolific.

According to Bandy, TLMI is a member of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) and the U.S. Plastics Pact. This membership enables TLMI to bring important resources to its own members.

“We bring all of that awareness, and we do webinars and have speakers, so that our members are very clear on how their labels need to function, in particular on plastic,” Bandy says.

AICC is no stranger to working with other organizations, either. The association is part of the Corrugated Packaging Alliance, which also includes TAPPI, the Fibre Box Association, and the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA). In November, the collaborative released a report on the life cycle of corrugated board using 2020 data, “which shows tremendous improvement in the sustainability of paper-based packaging compared to the 2016 life cycle analysis,” says D’Angelo.

Additionally, AICC shares recycling information provided by the AF&PA, as well as promotes and works with the Paper and Packaging Board’s Box to Nature program, which teaches consumers about the sustainability of corrugated packaging.

Keane says FPA's work with other organizations focuses on flexible packaging circularity. For instance, FPA partners with “parallel” associations to determine what circularity looks like in practice, from how to sort materials properly and reprocess them to what gets done with reprocessed materials.

Keane mentions FPA is part of the Material Recovery for the Future Coalition, a multi-year research project looking at how to turn films and flexible packaging into a bale of mixed flexible plastic packaging — known as rFlex — to be used for other purposes such as roofing board.

FPA also partners with the Consortium for Waste Circularity, which, as the name suggests, is geared toward circularity.

“All of that takes investment,” Keane says, “so we also have partnerships with folks like the Recycling Partnership [and] Sustainable Packaging Coalition to figure out how to get that investment for the collection, sortation, and reprocessing, and the investment that we need to find outlets for where that recycled content could go.”

Glimpsing the Future with EPR

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws are AMERIPEN's “bread and butter issue,” says Felton.

While four states — Oregon, California, Maine, and Colorado — are implementing laws, “none are fully up and running,” he explains.

Dan Felton, executive director at AMERIPEN, recently spoke at a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on extended producer responsibility. | Credit: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works

“We’re helping to get good, sound laws passed on extended producer responsibility that ideally are aligned with our policy, and then we’re working to make sure they’re implemented well,” he says. “Oftentimes, there’s actually more work on the back and it takes a lot to get a bill across the finish line, but it takes probably twice as much work to get programs such as extended producer responsibility — which is super complicated, lots of stakeholders — up and running. That’s what we’re working on in these four states right now.”

FPA is also invested in ensuring these laws are made right.

“A well-crafted extended producer responsibility bill would enable money to flow back into a nonprofit organization from packaging that is sold every single day in those states to then fund investment needed for collection, sortation, [and] recycling,” she explains. “For flexibles, since we don’t really have that infrastructure at scale, we’re going to need a lot more investment than some of the other packaging types. We think with these EPR bills, we’ll be able to get it because we’ll have an assessment or a fee that goes on flexible packaging that’ll be directed just to those opportunities.”

Keane says FPA works closely with Maryland, Illinois, Washington, and New York to make sure they meet the circularity needs of the flexible packaging industry, not just reinforce existing recycling programs.

As far as label-related plastics go, Bandy anticipates all of the still-emerging EPR laws to follow the APR Design Guide for Plastics Recyclability, which focuses heavily on labels.

“That ensures if you follow the APR Design Guide and your product has been tested to have followed the APR Design Guide, then you’re great in terms of EPR,” she says. “And all of the EPR schemes are going to follow it. There’s no question about that.”

On the paper side, PPC advocates for the paperboard packaging sector by monitoring the issues, educating its members, and prompting them to talk to their legislators.

“We don’t directly go to the lawmakers,” says Markens. “What we do is we galvanize our members to talk to their state reps and senators and so on.”

When EPR developments do occur, PPC makes sure its members stay in the loop. However, Markens notes, EPR laws may be better applied to substrates other than paperboard.

“Our industry [paperboard] is not against extended producer responsibility, we just don’t know that there’s a level playing field, because we already have recycling rates that are the envy of every other substrate,” he explains. “We’re in the 70% range, and if you look at plastics, glass, or aluminum, they’re all in either single digits or low double digits. So, one of the things we’re saying is: ‘We’re already most of the way there, why don’t you talk to the folks who are not even at the starting line? They might not even be in the stadium. Why don’t you get them to get their rates even close to ours?’”

Like PPC, AICC informs members of EPR developments and provides EPR education. However, D’Angelo agrees with Markens that paper isn’t the primary target of these laws — at least for now.

“So far, paper has not come under EPR, which if we look at it from a paper point of view, I like to say that EPR is a solution in search of a problem because paper has a very high recyclability rate right now,” D’Angelo says. “But paper’s always going to be looming in the discussion because, as EPR forces other packaging media to improve, unless paper is also improving, the gap is going to close and paper is going to have to improve — or the bar is going to become so high from a political point of view that paper is ultimately going to be caught up in EPR.”

With all packaging types subjected to sustainability metrics and laws, these associations can help guide the way forward for packaging converters.

Going for the Green

Each year, TLMI highlights six winners in three categories for its Calvin Frost Awards. Last year, one of the winners was AWT Labels & Packaging, which received the Journey Sustainability Award. | Credit: TLMI

Friendly competition often cultivates excellence. The Paperboard Packaging Council (PPC) puts this on display annually in its North American Paperboard Packaging Competition.

One of the categories features the best use of paper that reduces how much paper is used, or the replacement of another packaging substrate with paper. For instance, Ben Markens, president of PPC, highlighted the 2022 Paperboard Package of the Year: a Mentos gum paperboard container, which previously was made with plastic.

“That’s now a completely paper-based solution — 99.9% — so that’s a winner,” he says.

TLMI’s Sustainability Leadership Awards, which constitute one of the organization’s subcommittees within its Sustainability Committee, also has competitors aiming to be the greenest.

“Every year, we have applicants submit all of the things that they’re doing within their company,” says Rosalyn Bandy, vice president of sustainability at TLMI. “It can be on a lot of different topics. Then, we have a judging committee that determines the winners.”

Winners are chosen for their commitment to sustainability, and the awards provide an additional incentive to provide eco-friendly solutions.

The Role of AI

Within the packaging industry, people are mostly using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize workflows and automate. For Michael D’Angelo, president of AICC, The Independent Packaging Association, AI has implications for sustainability as well.

“I think that there’s a tremendous opportunity for efficiency from AI, and to me, efficiency translates into sustainability,” he says. “So that’s the next path that we’re going down relative to sustainability.”

One way AICC is embracing AI is with its AI Xperience Conference, held May 14-16 in Chicago, which details the ways AI can be utilized within packaging, and, by D’Angelo’s logic, boost sustainability outcomes.