ASSESSING THE PAPERBASED ALTERNATIVE As fibre-based materials innovate to increasingly compete in packaging niches recently dominated by plastics, brand owners face new challenges in evaluating respective sustainability implications. Tim Sykes spoke to Smurfit Kappa’s Arco Berkenbosch (VP innovation and development) and Jurgita Girzadiene (sustainability manager) about novel corrugated applications, a new approach to lifecycle analysis, and carbon footprints.
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Packaging Europe we’re pushing the climate crisis to the top of the sustainability agenda – and many of the most fundamental and contentious questions the packaging world must face lie at the intersection of carbon footprint and circularity. While the plastics value chain works on design for recyclability and building a viable circular economy, the paper industry is exploring opportunities to provide already recyclable alternatives to plastic packaging applications. Indeed, recent research has estimated that in European supermarkets 1.5 million tonnes of plastic could be replaced annually. As paper and plastics come to compete across more packaging contexts, brand owners will have decisions to make. As plastics raise their recyclability and paper innovates around functionality, how do brand owners assess the relative sustainability credentials? Creating alternatives to certain plastic applications – particularly around aggregation – has been on Smurfit Kappa’s strategic agenda for some time. At one end of the scale this has involved resurrecting traditional formats (such as corrugated trays and punnets) which had over the years been displaced by flexibles. At the other there has been blue-sky thinking: the company’s inaugural Better Planet Packaging design challenge brief asked designers to create paperbased alternatives to flexible pallet wrap. In between these poles, its R&D teams have been developing innovative products such as TopClip (an alternative to shrink film for can aggregation) and GreenClip (a replacement for plastic rings). TopClip, which utilises no glue and according to Smurfit Kappa boasts higher recycled content and lower carbon footprint than competing solutions, is already
Arco Berkenbosch
being trialled on shelves. Further collaborative projects with brand owners are set to be announced over the course of 2020. But as all segments of the industry progress around offering recyclable solutions, what are the relative carbon footprints, and how do we form a holistic view of the respective impacts of plastic and paper-based solutions?
Re-evaluating Lifecycle Analysis As Arco Berkenbosch reveals, Smurfit Kappa has been exploring how LCA can illuminate these dilemmas. In our discussion he began by highlighting the limitations and challenges of benchmarking. “LCAs are only really useful in looking case by case at specific products,” he said. “With so many variables, you can’t use them to make sweeping generalizations about different materials.” In addition to the susceptibility of LCAs to be framed for commercial or political reasons by manipulating their initial assumptions and the challenges around acquiring reliable benchmarking data, there’s a basic question of how to make sense of the findings. “Today the focus is often on two key metrics – litter and carbon footprint – and you can’t simply add them together to create an overall ‘sustainability’ number,” Arco remarked. “Nor can we choose one over the other: we have to tackle both problems.” Smurfit Kappa’s innovation here has been to distil LCA data (produced by a third party) into a nuanced snapshot of carbon and end of life metrics relating to a given product from cradle to grave, through its journey from
Jurgita Girzadiene Packaging Europe | 19 |
