Consumers and retailers alike value sustainable packaging in produce. Meanwhile, packaging companies are trying to deliver on what they — and increasingly, regulators — demand: namely less packaging, more packaging that is made of recyclable materials or is recyclable itself, and reduced packaging waste, often with a sometimes single-minded focus on reducing plastic.
But what if those definitions of “sustainable packaging” miss the mark on sustainability for produce? That’s the argument some packaging sustainability experts are making.
“Ninety percent of what packaging does, it does before the consumer sees it,” says Dan Duguay, senior director of sustainability at the Canadian Produce Marketing Association. “So, it’s important when we talk about sustainable packaging that it’s not seen simply through the sliver of what the consumer sees.”
Sustainability Out of Consumer Sight and Mind
The role of produce packaging is to work throughout the supply chain — from harvest or packing to the end consumer — as well as extending shelf-life, reducing food waste, ensuring food safety, maximizing shipping efficiency and much more, Duguay says. But this widespread impact on the sustainability of the fresh produce supply chain occurs in ways the consumer would never see and likely rarely think about.
For example, he outlines what the shipping impact could be if a company switched from a light plastic clamshell to a thicker fiberboard packaging.
“[If] you make a packaging change and it reduces the packing density by 2%, you’ve gone from 100 trucks to 102 trucks to move the same amount of produce,” he explains. The pursuit of greater sustainability in one area — in this example, reduced plastic — could incur greater sustainability costs in shipping, but those sustainability costs aren’t ones consumers usually see.
Shelf life and food waste are other areas consumers don’t always notice or understand well when considering sustainability. Still, the potential for packaging choices to impact those sustainability issues cannot be ignored, Duguay argues.
“If you move from packaging that gives you a shelf life of four days and a shrink rate of 4%, and it shifts to two days and 14%, is that a sustainable package if it’s slightly more recyclable than the previous package?” he explains.
That’s the fuller question of sustainability in produce packaging, Duguay says: “Those relationships between the packaging decision and those outcomes [are] what we define as sustainable packaging.”
We Must Move Beyond Materials
The narrow consumer-facing focus on reducing packaging and especially plastic is understandable, according to Rebecca Marquez, director of custom research for the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies (PMMI). She sums up the reason for that focus as driven by three main elements:
- Retailer commitments, such as 2030 sustainability goals.
- Regulatory momentum, such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) efforts.
- The high visibility of plastic and plastic waste to consumers.
While understandable, the attention on plastic and its reduction is insufficient for the sustainability needs of the fresh produce industry, Marquez continues.
“The more appropriate focus should be on reducing overall environmental impact, not simply eliminating a material category,” she says. “We’d like people to understand that ‘plastic-free’ does not automatically mean ‘more sustainable.’ In many produce applications, plastic enables [modified atmosphere packaging] that significantly extends shelf life. Replacing it without a functional alternative can increase food waste, which has its own environmental cost.”
Marquez outlined PMMI’s perspective that sustainable produce packaging should be defined as something along the following lines: Packaging that protects food safety and quality while minimizing total environmental impact across the full life cycle — through right-sizing, reuse where feasible, and compatibility with real-world recycling and composting systems.
“This definition is aligned with what we consistently see across our research: Sustainability in produce cannot be separated from performance,” she says, adding that PMMI has found “that the biggest sustainability gains can come from systems-based solutions” rather than focusing on materials alone.
Duguay says he fears that as long as conversation around sustainability fixates on the end of life for packaging, and plastic packaging in particular, “we will incur these unintended negative consequences on those supply chains.” Instead, he says, “We need to talk about packaging, not just as an inert thing, but as the fact that it packages something and that what it packages really defines how effective, how sustainable that packaging is.”
That something is, of course, fresh produce, which is much different from most other packaged products that reach consumers.
“As soon as it’s cut, it’s dying,” Duguay says. “What needs to happen is a recognition that we’re actually shipping something that’s alive, and that the packaging, in many instances, is quite important to ... maximizing that life before it gets to you.”
