Speaking Sustainably: How Packaging and Sustainability Can Go Together

"What the problem that packaging is trying to solve is to get the most product into consumers' homes as fast as possible, in the condition that they expect. This approach changes your whole perspective of why packaging exists," said Lilienfeld, who has studied environmental sustainability and biodegradable packaging for almost 30 years.

Take the food packaging bag of a grab-and-go hamburger in the grocery deli, for example. Complete with a bun, beef patty, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions and sauce, every ingredient had its own growth cycle. Each ingredient required its own water, herbicides, and energy expended to get that part of the burger to the supermarket, to keep it fresh before purchase, and fresh all the way up until consumption.

That’s a huge amount of energy going into that one burger, with each ingredient having its own environmental impact. To ensure the product itself has the smallest environmental impact, biodegradable packaging is key, Lilienfeld said.

To minimize environmental impact, it’s important that consumers are educated on the overall aspect of packaging. So often packaging and sustainability seem at odds with one another to consumers, but in the bigger picture, packaging has a role to play in environmental sustainability.

Consumer attitudes are heading in two key directions: one, they want more recyclable packaging and two, they want packaging that’s biodegradable packaging or compostable pouch.

"We think there are potential options for the future we’re going to look at, but in the short term let’s find ways to reduce the impact of the product we have," Lilienfeld said. "I thought what they did was pretty smart, which was to replace as much of the polystyrene in the tabs with a substance that is a biopolymer, reducing the amount of energy used and greenhouse gases generated when producing the closures."

Retailers can help consumers understand they stock products that aim to reduce the environmental impact of food packaging with innovations. They maintain utility value but ratchet down the environmental impact.