So just who is responsible for packaging?

The Australian Packaging Convenant has as an underlying principle, the belief that a business has responsibility for it’s packaging from design to dumping and beyond.

This means that to be truly sustainable, a business should not only be thinking about how to make and use a packaging that protects the food, but have minimal environmental impact at all stages of it’s life – including when it is thrown away by the consumer.

Packaging designers have now not only got to develop packaging that meets all the traditional requirements of protection, transport, printing, labelling, preservation, and image, but must now do so with an overarching requirement that it also has minimal environmental impact. This is an incredibly tough job in a business, especially when the Convenent states that there is still responsibility for that packaging even after the consumer has thrown it away – or as it is known “whole of life”!!!

Many companies are naturally having difficulty in coming to terms with this new way of looking at their business, as it is a gigantic shift from the traditional approach of responsibility stops once the consumer takes the product home. It is requiring a major change of perspectives within the business and the development of a sustainable approach at all levels.

This is leading to major work and developments of new and innovative packaging and methods.

The Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) has just released a document called a white paper to show the support it is able to give to help businesses within the food industry take on this dramatic shift in business.

The ‘Future of Packaging’ was written after a lot of discussion with government, retailers, packaging manufacturers, recyclers and consumers to show the actions that AFGC and others will need to undertake to move this change in business direction across the whole of the industry.

Some changes have been made, like making packaging lighter, but these are only baby steps in the whole scheme of making the food industry, and particularly the packaging side, more sustainable.