22 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | JULY 22, 2024
Opinion & Commentary
OTHER VOICES
Sustainable packaging: From aspiration to bold action
By Omar Asali
E
-commerce giant Amazon in
June announced its largest
reduction in plastic packaging
to date.
Amazon has largely removed
plastic air pillows from its packaging
in North America, and by the end
of this year expects to eliminate
plastic altogether
and shift to paper
packaging materials.
That's tens of
millions of pounds of
single-use plastic film
that won't end up in
the homes of Amazon customers,
that won't clog our waterways,
and that won't occupy landfills for
the duration of our children's and
grandchildren's lifetimes.
There is no doubt that the corpo-
rate world has experienced a seismic
shift in consumer and societal
expectations toward the adoption of
more sustainable business practices
over the past decade. A recent study
cited that Gen-Z consumers value
sustainability over brand names,
while regulators have been hard at
work designing laws to encourage
the use (and penalize the nonuse) of
sustainable practices.
The conversation is lively, the
momentum is strong, and yet most
businesses only announce lofty
sustainability goals as marketing
tools with continuously shifting and
dubious future timelines.
At first glance, it can be hard to
see past the challenges of these
aspirations. Retooling your lines, or
redesigning your products to incor-
porate more sustainable materials
while maintaining their original
integrity? That's complex, expensive
and time-consuming.
Reducing the overall greenhouse
gas emissions that your business
produces? Also, very difficult. But
among businesses that ship products
— whether business-to-consumer,
business-to-business, e-commerce
or brick and mortar — adopting more
sustainable solutions to protect prod-
ucts in shipment is a no-brainer.
More sustainable packaging alter-
natives with comparable cost and
performance have been available for
years, but we continue to hear a lot of
talk, with very little action.
The potential environmental impact
of choosing sustainable packaging
alternatives over plastic is invaluable.
Packaging is estimated to account for
a walloping 50% of all plastic waste
generated. The fact that so many busi-
nesses have been slow to transition
away from single-use plastic packaging
is unfortunate and has had detrimental
consequences for our planet.
It is now visible that our world is
literally drowning in plastic waste.
According to the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), we
generated 6.3 billion metric tons of
plastic waste from 1950 to 2015, and
currently leak approximately 20 million
metric tons of plastic waste each year
into our lakes, rivers and seas.
If that weren't bad enough, an Austra-
lian study recently concluded that the
average person ingests one credit card
of plastic each week. Looking forward,
the Ellen McArthur Foundation reports
that by 2050, there could be more
plastic by weight than fish in the sea.
And while we know that packaging is an
enormous contributor to that problem,
it's a solvable part of the problem.
Of course, eliminating plastic
packaging would not eliminate 50% of
all plastic waste. Some products and
packaging applications require plastic.
But eliminating plastic packaging
whenever possible is the low-hanging
fruit in our collective effort to reduce
plastic waste.
It doesn't require an R&D team to
develop new materials, or a develop-
ment team to fully redesign a product.
It doesn't mean that consumers need
to familiarize themselves with new
product experiences, or new ways
of recycling (i.e., think paper bags
or straws). The fact is, we need our
business leaders to move beyond
aspiration and take bold action.
Deeds, not words.
Amazon's recent announcement
is the clearest indication yet that
this constellation of factors is finally
tipping the scales. As a market
leader, Amazon will no doubt set a
new standard that we hope other
companies will follow.
There are watershed moments in life,
and this might be one of them. Broad
awareness can lead to big actions.
The transition from single-use plastic
packaging to sustainable packaging
materials is not a banal nice-to-have.
It is a corporate responsibility that
should be acted upon with urgency.
Omar Asali is the CEO and chairman of
Ranpak, a Shelton-based manufacturer
of sustainable packaging materials.
Omar Asali
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