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Sustainability Still a Global Key Packaging Focus, Despite COVID

The packaging industry is in high gear as the pandemic enters year two, searching for innovative solutions to sustainable packaging and e-commerce design demands.

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Day one of the Sustainability in Packaging virtual event covered a range of topics such as the impact of COVID on the packaging industry (and plans for post-COVID), plastics recycling, and packaging design for e-commerce.

Here are just some of the highlights from today’s content:

Impact of COVID on Packaging Industry

Adam Page, Director of Research and Reports at Smithers, said that though there was a dip in the global packaging market forecast in 2020, there is a current rebound underway with the expectation of a return to former projected growth by 2024.

The pandemic has accelerated pre-existing trends such as fast-tracking e-commerce usage; shifted consumer behavior in ways such as increasing consumption of pre-packaged food products; and disrupted supply chains with material shortages, shipping delays, and resultant increases in material prices.

And when looking at post-COVID trends, Page said sustainability is still a key driver (particularly in the area of lightweighting), and e-commerce brings big opportunities to the areas of transit and protective packaging. E-commerce has seen a ten-year growth in three-month’s time during the pandemic, and Nielsen forecasts 70% of global consumers will do their grocery shopping online by 2024. With this rise in e-commerce comes a need for additional packaging to enable products to enter a more complex distribution chain.


See this video: E-commerce 2020 in less than 20 minutes


Page also said there is investment and increase in collection and recycling, as well as investment in simplifying multi-material laminates and developing high-barrier mono-material solutions. Chemical recycling in the US is another emerging market (one that is discussed in more detail in the next section).

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