A few themes we explore in this session:
- What is the next big packaging innovation?
- How can we convince suppliers to change to sustainable packaging when their customers’ biggest deciding factor is the lowest price point?
- What are some strategies for tackling the scale at which we’ll need to produce regenerative packaging alternatives?
There’s lots of great ideas out there, for instance – carbon negative, but that might only make sense for a certain area. You don’t want be shipping that across the world because then it loses all the viability of that regenerative system. By investing in something that’s local, you can attach your company to that ecosystem or that community. If the inputs are sourced locally, you can actually make an impact. For a lot of packaging right now, we don’t know where any of those inputs are coming from and that’s concerning for many reasons.
I think ‘scale’ has to be rethought. I don’t like to use the term recycling because a bag of chips is never gonna become another bag of chips. It’s gonna become a dog Frisbee or a deck board. It’s not circular. If I took a handful of glitter and blew it all over, and asked you nicely, ‘Can you pick up all those pieces and bring them back to me?’ How much of that would I get back? That’s entropy, that’s the current problem, and you don’t solve entropy with more entropy. You have to be able to do things efficiently on a smaller scale.