The Circular Economy: Sustainable Packaging

• Published date: 14 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Environment, Consumer Protection, Environmental Law, Consumer Law
• Law Firm: Cipher
• Author: Cipher &nbsp

Overview

Improving the trajectory towards achieving circular economy targets requires a step-change in approach to sustainable packaging adoption across fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs).

To track this progress, we analysed patent data to see the innovation landscape across a subset of plastic packaging alternatives.

Consumers' purchasing power can force change. One of the findings from Mintel research is this simple concept: doing things that are beneficial to the environment makes people feel happy. This is a fundamental driver of change.

Mintel are the experts in understanding what consumers want and why. Their 2022 Sustainability Barometer - which Cipher contributed data to - provides direct insight into sustainability topics including packaging.

Top of the list for consumer sustainability behaviours was recyclable packaging, ahead of:

• planning meals at home
• buying fewer new clothes
• reducing the consumption of meat and poultry.

Consumer insight

Expanding on consumer understanding on the topic of plastic packaging, the report provided the following insight based on consumer responses.

The percentage of responses for each statement which were "yes I knew that" are shown.

• In some cases, plastic packaging is better for the environment than paper: 39%
• Degradable and biodegradable packaging are not the same thing 60%
• The inclusion of recycled content (even 100%) in a package does not always mean it can be recycled: 55%

Mintel also looked at topics through the lens of a "value action gap" between consumers' declared intent and actual behaviour. "I try not to be harmful to the environment" is an example of intent.

The gap between people agreeing with this and performing the simplest, most commonplace, and costless of sustainable tasks, for example recycling packaging, had a gap of 23 percentage points.

This links closely to the finding that 46% of consumers believe that companies, as opposed to governments or consumers, are most responsible for increasing the amount of packaging that is recycled.

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