RETHINKING PACKAGING, RETHINKING PRODUCT DESIGN Sophie Kieselbach is a senior consultant at Thinkstep, specialising in life cycle assessment and sustainability. She speaks with Elisabeth Skoda about challenges and opportunities for packaging, and what light the current pandemic crisis sheds on creating a sustainable future. ES: What would you identify as the biggest challenges the packaging industry has to face this coming year and beyond?
SK: Packaging, especially plastics packaging, gets a lot of negative publicity – people forget that it does have a purpose. I just recently read the article on Packaging Europe about the new EU Commissioner for the Environment thinking out loud about completely banning plastics packaging. We cannot afford this from a material technological point of view, especially on a big scale. Last year, Earth Overshoot day, the day on which we exhaust resources the
planet can renew, was on July 29th. We already use far too many resources. In that context, getting rid of an entire material group is ludicrous, it just means shifting the problem around. Having said that, even though there are many wonderful, innovative and sustainable products out there, for many companies in the packaging industry it is still business as usual. There are some exciting ideas out there, for example presenting cosmetics in powder form and telling the consumer how to mix with water, which enables the use of less packaging. It is important to keep the big picture in Packaging Europe | 39 |
