Progress is rarely a straight trajectory, and this couldn’t be truer of the move towards sustainability. Neil Osment, Managing Director of packaging market research company NOA, says over the last five to seven years, it’s been a story of back and forth.
Achieving sustainability is anything but a straightforward journey; progress continues to go through many twists and turns, as it reacts towards different stakeholders and different influences.
Firstly, global politics has a huge bearing on the transition towards sustainability, seemingly a campaign of Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
We are generalising, but it’s true to say that while Europe is making a huge effort to become more sustainable, the mood in the rest of the world - led by the United States, Latin America and East Asia - is more dominated by the sentiment of ‘drill baby, drill!’. You only have to look at the recent COP30 in Brazil – to which the US sent no delegates at all, and which the Premiers of China and India also chose not to attend – to find evidence of this.
Within Europe itself, there is a push and pull at play too. On the one hand, we have the European Green Deal - the EU’s ambitious environmental strategy to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. However, within separate nations, there are some – including Poland, Hungary, and Italy – which have opposed or sought to water down many elements of the regulations.
The UK government shares the EU’s goal of achieving net zero by 2050, but there is major opposition from parties like Reform and the Conservatives, and right wing media outlets such as the Daily Mail. Both the current and last government have let their stated aims slip; it seems that sustainability (as a practical improvement to our way of life) is not an easy task to deliver.
Then we look at the practicalities of delivering change within other parts of Europe and we find a similar ebb and flow in delivery. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is headlined as a directive to reduce, reuse and recycle packaging. However, PPWR’s mechanism of delivery - Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) – in reality favours lightweight products, which turns out as a win for plastics.
On a consumer level, affordability plays a much bigger part today than environmental concerns. In the years of the pandemic, we became much more aware of sustainability and – with time to think about the impact on the planet – we began trying and supporting more sustainable products.
However the cost of living crisis and soaring energy costs have caused our passion to ebb away. The mood now is much more towards believing that while sustainability is a great ambition, it’s not currently affordable.
We see lacklustre growth in the European economy as a whole mirrored in the demand for packaging generally, which hasn’t grown much over the last four years, and is forecast not to grow in any significant way in either 2026 or 2027. When we don’t buy as much as we used to, we don’t need an increase in packaging.
On the other hand, brand owners are aware that consumers want – in fact, they even demand - sustainability (albeit at an affordable price) and so the flow towards ‘greener’ packaging continues.
And what place does compliance have in this ebb and flow scenario? PPWR and EPR are all very well, but compliance is incredibly complicated – we know of companies now employing multiple compliance experts in their businesses to help navigate this regime. This complexity is providing an opportunity for some companies (who could possibly be labelled snake oil salesmen) to jump in and promise the world to retailers who are striving to tick those sustainability boxes and satisfy their consumers’ noble needs.
So we really have an ebb/flow, ebb/flow situation, but we hope and believe, that ultimately progress is gradually being made.
Look to the long-term, and – with continuing pressure from European consumers – sustainability should be an achievable task. Peace in Ukraine could be a starting point; inflation should come down, and at the same time we will all be a little more used to higher levels of inflation than were previously experienced. A stable future, albeit at higher costs, should encourage our focus to return to more important, longer term aims - such as protecting our environment!
More sustainable packaging is being introduced continually. For example, UK-based Cadbury’s is moving towards paper-based tubs for Heroes; while Denmark-based Lego (which champions plastic in its products) is now putting the components into paper pouches, instead of plastic; and Sweden-based IKEA is determined to go plastic free by the 2030s.
At NOA, we observe that there is a strong spirit in Europe towards sustainability which we believe will win through, and we see 2028 as the turning point. We watch with interest.
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