Sustainability, online shopping drive packaging trends

Austin, Texas — Packaging, which includes plastics, is moving into a “new ordinary” exactly where sustainability and electronic commerce concerns will engage in an more and more outsized position.

“I would like to make the circumstance that we are getting into truly a new pattern and a new standard,” David Feber, a associate at consulting agency McKinsey & Co.’s Detroit business office, said at the new Packaging Conference in Austin.

“If I could oversimplify and slash up the final 22 a long time or so into a few unique sections, I think the to start with 10 years of this century, it was really about substrate wars. PET and plastic was developing it was getting share from glass and aluminum in some circumstances, as was flexible packaging, stand-up pouches. There was a whole lot of development,” Feber reported.

“The up coming 10 yrs we started out to see sustainability appear into a lot more concentrate. The large driver in sustainability was lightweighting and downgauging, which was actually a charge-reduction enjoy, but also using much less, which is superior,” he spelled out.

“We begun to see recycled material truly begin to be investing at a premium to virgin and put into resources. And we started out to see the 1st varieties of e-commerce and digital in the grocery group,” stated Feber, who prospects McKinsey’s packaging team.

And then COVID-19 struck.

“During the pandemic, we truly hit two massive shifts that hit a tipping position. A single was sustainability sensitivity. At the very early part of the pandemic, factors variety of went backward where there was a huge improve in solitary-use packaging,” Feber claimed.

“And then there was a counterreaction and the planet stood up and explained sufficient is adequate. And we’ve seen regulation and purchaser commitments definitely at an all-time substantial. It genuinely is a new chapter. It really is not like it has been for the past 10 or 15 yrs,” he explained.