Sustainability - the infinite game

Sustainability is ubiquitous, and it is especially interwoven into the packaging industry. We are faced daily with mixed, incomplete or wrong messaging about sustainable packaging. I have yet to see a single survey of consumers that does not place sustainability at the absolute top of the list of their key requirements for brands to achieve.

Would that it were this simple. The myriad of complexities in talking about sustainability start with the simplest issue of all; meaning. It means different things to different people, depending on circumstance and perspective. The definition that I had always sought to apply to it was something that is able to continuously run and keep a quality and output for a long, ideally infinite, amount of time. The dictionary states "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level". Of course, the moment this concept becomes reality there are all sorts of amends, tweaks and pivots that cause it to ripple out and end up something completely different.

The main issue is that to maintain something at a certain rate or level it needs to be efficiently made, and that is a major point of discrepancy between the sustainable ideal a consumer might have in their mind when they state it is the most critical thing for them in a purchasing decision and the company that has to make that product and get it to them in a way that ensures it is fresh, preserved of the highest quality and other factors that actually dominate consumer need.

Here is the first crux. The market research tells us what consumers think we want to hear. No one is going to say "I dont care about the planet and think trash is wonderful, sustainability is just a fad and I cant be bothered" but their intention and their stated insight are at odds. When a consumer says sustainability is the number 1 priority for them, they mean on top of everything else they expect the packaging to do. It is #1, but I need the same quality, convenience, novelty, occasion, branding, taste and cost... and for it to be sustainable.

Addressing this is difficult for two reasons. Scale and cost. There are a number of excellent sustainable solutions for materials. However they can not be made in the numbers needed to swap into daily usage in an industry that consumes hundreds of thousands of Kiltons of material. For example, one of the biggest suppliers in the USA can make 50KT of material per year, yet just one of the major food companies (of the top 200 or so ) consumes 160KT per year. There is no point in focusing on a sustainable solution that can not be made in requisite numbers.

And then we have cost. We have already established that consumers want everything to be the same or better and in sustainable packaging. But most of the time this technology costs more. It has to be developed, tested, scaled, implemented and finally may be able to switch out a major product line. But that takes time and money and consumer goods companies are repeatedly faced with the conundrum that consumers do not expect to pay more for this sustainable packaging that they have demanded. So, even if the manufacturer can find a sustainable solution and get it to market and swap it into their brands, they can find themselves selling less or not at all.

The reason is that ultimately for the vast majority of consumers, cost is king. I would love to have the sustainable packaging and feel better about the part I play as a conscious consumer making responsible choices.... but I also cant afford to stick to these principles. With incoming CRV taxes and ever increasing grocery costs , coupled with market uncertainty... we revert to type and vote with our wallets. We make our money go further and we switch to private brands or budget options. We try to avoid the shrinkflation we see and get as much as we can with our available budget.

Where does this leave us? If the status quo is not working, which most would argue it is not as we are in this situation, there must be solutions that provide a better way?

One such way, which one can argue makes the most sense and is the best of these options, is to change the mindset and stop trying to "win" at sustainability. This has enormous benefits, and helps move from the linear make use dispose model to the circular model that governments worldwide are set on reaching. When companies stop looking short term and thinking of sustainability as something that can be achieved in a quarterly basis or to provide shareholder value , and adopts an infinite game mindset where the aim is to use resources to continue to be in business forever, there are multiple benefits.

An infinite mindset means manufacturing is seen from a holistic perspective and companies look at how they can make more products better for less resources, or reuse those resources sustainably. If, rather than trying to make more products on existing equipment with its various maintenance and productivity issues, suppliers are able to make systems that can run 24/7 on less energy or with less downtime or resources consumed, they will make more products, efficiently. This efficiency can lead to finding other opportunities for resources that had historically been focused on the short term focus, and this resource efficiency ultimately will help the journey towards a circular economy.

If a company is going to embrace this mindset they also have to communicate it to their customers. If they are able to use less to make the same great product, many consumers see this and expect the savings to be passed to them. If we are being told there has been a reduction in cost or improvement in efficiency it follows that the cost should be adjusted too. It rarely is and this causes friction. The other source of friction in communication on sustainability is to be told that a product is sustainable if there is not the process or system in place to allow it to be circular. Whether that is no recycling capabilities, or not providing at home composting (requiring a chemical composting plant to be available to provide a compostable solution) while the material might technically be sustainable the consumer is not able to action this and so sees it as a misleading claim.

Sustainability needs to connect the product and the consumer, allowing both to fulfill their parts. The product remains high quality and leads to an improved experience or ease of use or novelty or nostalgia or any one of a number of potential benefits of use AND it allows us to fulfill our responsibility as consumers to not leave a mess or waste resources. Ideally for at least the same price as before if not cheaper ultimately. If consumers can substitute in the new packaging to their lives without friction, and maybe even enriching their lives in some way, there will be increased voting with wallets to acquire that product.

Reaching for the stars is also a lot more compelling as an attitude that consumers can get behind. If there is a sense that a company is sincerely looking into the future and hoping to do everything they can to keep going and delighting their customers "at a certain rate or level" consumers will get behind that company and be willing to support it and feel like they are part of something bigger, which in turn allows people to push cost down their list of priorities and actually spend more on a product... if it is "worth" it. That worth can be triggered by driving or supporting a cause that is so purposeful that consumers feel happy to get behind it.

This seems like a far better aim and message then the short term , self-benefiting messaging that does not really connect consumer and product and can lead to disruption and distrust.