Packaging Impressions' Parlor: Reinventing Shopper Packaging with Circular, Reusable, Printed Solutions

If there is one thing the packaging industry has taught me, it is that it is never enough to only focus on a problem. Many of the seemingly endemic situations packaging companies face – be it a finicky folder-gluer on the production floor, or a byzantine permitting process that complicates how the entire plant is managed – the problems themselves will stay just that, unless you shift your focus to the solutions.

Take in point the curious case, as reported by Jessica Roy in the LA Times, of the California Coastal Clean-up. Back in 2016, the state’s ban on low-density polyethylene (LDPE) shopping bags went into effect in grocery stores. Just before the ban, during the annual California Coastal Clean-up event in 2016, volunteers across the state collected 24,602 such shopping bags along Golden State shores.

By the time of the 2022 California Coastal Clean-up, those numbers had reached 26,690. Clearly, California consumers had not settled on a good solution to a real waste problem. In fact, as Roy reported, the group Californians Against Waste calculated that Californians used eight pounds of plastic bags per person in 2004, but in 2021, five years after the ban took effect, that number had reached 11 pounds per person.

Those same plastic bags, which, on average, are only used by consumers for a total of 12 minutes, wind up slowly decomposing in landfills – or worse. Often, they are found clogging up sewer drains, drifting along as part of the world’s unsettlingly high volume of ocean plastic, or creating havoc in recycling plants meant to handle other, easier-to-recycle materials.

But enough of the problem, what about the solutions? Raw materials and the resources needed to manufacture them are not infinite. The onus, then, is on us and our peers to design out waste and pollution and keep materials in use for longer, to reduce demand for natural resources. In short, to take a circular approach and move away from a ‘take, make, waste’ economy.

For the sake of understanding the philosophy behind the innovation, let me take a couple of sentences to share a little about DS Smith. Our business has operated on this basis for more than a decade, and our business model has been “circular” since the 1960s. We believe a circular approach is the type we all need to start getting used to, and I believe this not only poses some of the most exciting and commercially rewarding challenges, but that it is also essential to ensure a growing, vibrant and sustainable packaging industry.

Back to the persistent plastic bags, and a solution that started in a perhaps unlikely place – poultry. For years, poultry, fresh meat and seafood processors have used wax coated packaging. This is effective in protecting products but has a significant drawback – it is not recyclable. In 2010, the creation of a recyclable, food-safe, moisture-resistant, coated box offering to package and ship products was a game-changer. Called Greencoat, these patented boxes from DS Smith are a successful, sustainable replacement for the non-recyclable, wax-coated boxes used in those industries. Greencoat has also helped companies like poultry processor Mountaire Farms go from paying $50-$70 per ton in waste disposal fees for coated boxes to earning $70-$100 per ton for the board it can now sell into recycling streams.

Happily, we’ve found that this successful replacement for wax-coated poultry boxes can also be part of the solution to the long-standing single-use shopping bag issue. In creating new box designs for Greencoat-coated board, DS Smith North America Packaging and Paper developed a new shopping box offering, which we call GreenTote, that serves as a replacement – and a reusable one – for those bags.

Re-use is one of the keys to the solution to the single-use plastic shopping bag saga. If supermarkets stopped using single-use plastic bags, but returned to the single-use paper bags that were the norm decades ago, we would see difficult new inefficiencies arise. Paper bag manufacturing requires more water and energy resources than plastic bag manufacturing. So, although they are not easy to recycle, re-usable plastic shopping bags do counter the trends of our take, make, waste culture each time they are re-used.

And, what if you could increase sustainability with re-use and recyclability as well? DS Smith’s Greencoat coating increases board strength by 30-40%, and so, thanks to some inspired design decisions, GreenTote boxes for supermarket shopping can withstand being folded down, stored, and then reassembled for reuse dozens of times. The large billboard areas also are an excellent canvas for printed graphics and text.

Re-use is on the way up in the supermarket aisle, and with some ingenuity from fiber-based packaging producers, recycling can be as well. Ten U.S. states and five U.S. territories have banned the use of disposable plastic bags in grocery stores, with several municipalities also adopting restrictions in states that do not have a ban already. Plastic replacement can extend into grocery shopping bags to meaningfully reduce the plastic litter accumulating in our beautiful landscapes and waterways