There is no doubt in my mind that the sustainable packaging effort is going to continue to grow, The COVID-19 outbreak will definitely put economic pressure on many businesses, but hopefully, governments around the world will offer tax breaks and other incentives to move to a more sustainable model. Although an unwelcome event for all of us, COVID-19 will be a catalyst for great change in many ways which hopefully will also make change more acceptable allowing ECO Friendly packaging to become more normal more quickly.
At the end of 2019, single-use plastic reduction and the creation of sustainable packaging were high on the agenda. Has the coronavirus pandemic given the movement more weight – or scuppered it?
This year was going to be one of seismic change for packaging. Because towards the end of 2019, the food and drink industry was setting out some truly ambitious targets. Stark warnings such as the one from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum, which forecast the oceans would contain more plastic than fish by weight by 2050, meant something had to be done. And so the industry united under one common aim: to reduce the detrimental impact of packaging on the environment.
Supermarkets and manufacturers established packaging as an urgent priority. But then came a challenge even more immediate than environmental destruction: Covid-19. The effect was to push sustainability down the priority list, as the industry dealt with a more pressing need: to feed the nation, amid huge supply chain disruption, and unwieldy spikes and shifts in demand, and all the while keeping employees safe.
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