Reducing Plastic Waste: Walmart Sustainable Packaging Summit Overview & Implications for Paperboard
By Brian Westerlind, PPC Government Affairs & Sustainability Liaison
PPC recently attended Walmart’s latest Sustainable Packaging Innovation Summit. This year’s topic? Reducing plastic waste and moving toward a circular economy.
Among other sustainability goals, the retail giant aims to eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging by 2025 in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. While one arm of their strategy focuses on increasing the viability of plastics recycling, the main drivers are plastics reduction and substitution with other substrates—a clear opportunity for sustainable, recyclable paperboard packaging.
We Can’t Recycle Our Way Out of the Plastic Problem
Featuring sessions from industry leaders as well as nonprofit professionals and activists, the Summit offered many perspectives on reducing plastic waste (which, one speaker noted, would nearly triple in the world’s oceans by 2040 if we don’t take action). A common thread throughout the discussions was that recycling plastics is not an answer in itself. A viable solution to the plastic problem will only come with two other crucial changes:
- Using less plastic (Again, an opportunity for our industry to benefit from substitution.)
- Creating better systems (Collaborations and synergies between companies, governments, and NGOs can help create overall systems that decrease plastic waste.)
The Path Forward: Alignment, Measurement, Transparency
In the spirit of creating better systems, numerous nonprofits and companies are banding together to take on the monster task of reducing plastic waste. The overall thinking is that organizations and actors across the supply chain must align to develop consistent systems for measurement, common language, and transparency about progress.
Organizations are creating some interesting tools to help. The Recycling Partnership is working on a Plastic IQ Tool, a digital resource that will allow companies to analyze and prioritize actions to improve their plastic packaging strategies. The World Wildlife Fund, working with businesses like Keurig and McDonalds, has created the ReSource Footprint Tracker that provides a standard methodology to track companies’ plastic footprints and publicly report on the progress of their plastic waste commitments.
How Paperboard Can Improve
During a presentation on substitute materials, there was excitement about new, cutting edge substrates such as bioplastics and nanocellulose. Still, the speaker mentioned that companies are looking at “age-old, infinitely recyclable materials” like aluminum and paper.
One clear area where our industry can improve? The speaker asserted that, for use in applications that would replace plastic, paperboard needs innovation in terms of coatings and liners that can make it through a recycling or compost stream. This seems to be our industry’s biggest barrier to fully capitalizing on the opportunity that the plastics problem presents us. Paperboard is renewable, sustainable, and recyclable. Now we need to work on innovation so we can provide more diverse solutions.
Some people might say that paper simply can’t package every product. It’s our industry’s job to wonder, what if it can? Let’s strive toward new and innovative solutions that can increase our market share.
Watch a full recording of the Sustainable Packaging Innovation Summit here.