Nick Riedl: SPC, or the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, has made a name for themselves as one of the leading voices in sustainability in the industry. At the Packaging School, we find this topic to be an important one, so we sat down with SPC Director Olga Kachook to discuss the importance of strong communication with consumers, the benefits of third-party certifications, a trend they’ve coined as “paperization,” and much more.
Dr. Julie Suggs: First off, can you just tell us a little bit about your awesome role at SPC and, kind of, how you got in this place to be the director?
Olga Kachook: Sure, so my name is Olga Kachook—I'm the director of the SPC, which stands for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. And we are a membership-based group of companies from all across the packaging value chains.
In terms of my background, I used to work in environmental consulting and then I worked for about a year and a half with a compostable packaging manufacturer. That's, kind of, how I got the packaging bug and it, you know, for those outside of packaging, I think it feels very niche, but then once you're in it, you're like, oh, packaging is everywhere.
Dr. Julie Suggs: You know, SPC has said that, you know, you guys are in the era of paperization—what are some factors that you feel like are driving this trend?
Olga Kachook: Yeah, so paperization is a term that we came up with to represent what we've been seeing over the last, maybe, year and a half with more and more companies moving into paper for their packaging formats. And I think a big part of this is coming from the fact that trees are a renewable resource, unlike fossil fuels.
For companies that want to know that their packaging supply chain is, you know, is getting certified, that they're sourcing from responsible, you know, suppliers. Fiber is really one of the only ways that they can have that level of assurance. And then there's the side of consumers and legislators and how they respond to and understand and relate to paper. I think most people recognize that, you know, consumers see paper as having, kind of more of, that earthy look and feel—it seems to be more readily associated for consumers as being recyclable. So, there's that benefit of that, you know, maybe we have to communicate a little bit less to consumers what to do with this package or the fact that it is recyclable. It's a little bit less of a learning curve.
There's so many examples of new packaging formats that, you know, maybe ten years ago, for sure, but even a couple of years ago, no one would have thought that it would be possible to design those formats in a fiber-based option. And now we're seeing them on the market. So, things like pouches, candy bar wrappers, blister packs for medication, berry punnets—a lot of the produce section has new fiber-based packaging. So, there's really all of these alternatives coming on the market. In the secondary packaging, protective packaging, a lot of the bubble wrap is being replaced with fiber-based wrap alternatives. It's really exciting—cool innovations.
Dr. Julie Suggs: So, how do you feel like companies can, you know, effectively and responsibly market these, you know, sustainable sourcing practices to avoid, you know, misconceptions and making sure they're accurate and transparent and credible to their, you know, their client base.
Olga Kachook: Yeah, and I mean, I get it, companies want to get credit for the work that they're doing, and they want to get that credit with consumers; they want the recognition, they want the sort of, you know, green halo of more sustainable materials, especially if it's part of their brand identity—and it can get complicated.
So, I think the easiest or the most important shortcut to avoid greenwashing is to use third-party certifications. So, instead of just saying it's responsibly sourced, you can use FSC certified fibers and then showcase the FSC logo on packaging. And then, I think this is the most important and really the missing piece is you have to explain to consumers what this means. I think with FSC, more and more consumers are starting to understand that, generally speaking, this means that something good happened for forests along the way, but there's really a lot more that we could do to educate consumers, and it doesn't have to be on pack. Companies have social media channels, websites and lots of other opportunities to tell this story to consumers. If more companies started to use these certifications and then explained their meaning to consumers, more consumers would understand, and they would look for those products with those logos and that would make sustainable sourcing practices more common, more in demand, and hopefully, a little bit cheaper.
Dr. Julie Suggs: Since we are in this paperization era, you know, how do you feel like companies can help or do a better job designing paper-based packaging, you know, and how likely are they to be successfully recycled in, you know, various regional markets?
Olga Kachook: It's a big question, and a lot of it is unknown at this point and will require companies to do quite a bit of due diligence and independent testing, to be honest. The good news is that for the North American market, our How2Recycle program, our sister program at our parent nonprofit, Green Blue, looks at a range of criteria to assess recyclability. So it's not, again, it's not just about the material; it's about all of these other factors—whether there's an end market for the product, whether it will get sorted at a MRF. And if a company is just starting out, they can get a recyclability assessment of their package from How2Recycle, and then make some design changes so that the package is more likely to get sorted properly, to be repulpable, and to have value as a material at its end of life.
So, there are many nuances in the journey, but at least doing something like the recyclability assessment will give you some indicators of, you know, ok, these are some things that you might not have considered or potential weaknesses, so to speak, for your package that you should explore and, you know, drill deeper into and get better data on. Before we can assume anything, we need to, it's a little bit of a trust-but-verify situation, we need to actually verify that these things are true, and testing and a program like How2Recycle can help companies do that.
Nick Riedl: We’d like to thank Olga and the team at SPC for taking the time to sit down with us. To learn more about the work that SPC is doing, you can visit them online at sustainablepackaging.org. And as always, we welcome you to subscribe to the Packaging School on Youtube, for more videos just like this one.
