The inside scoop on the Sustainable Packaging Summit 2024

In a rush? Click here to read a short summary of this story

This recap offers a comprehensive look into the pressing challenges and emerging solutions in sustainable packaging, as discussed at the Sustainable Packaging Summit 2024. With mounting regulatory pressure, rising energy costs, and fragmented data systems, the sector stands at a pivotal crossroads – either adapt rapidly or risk falling behind.

• Europe’s competitiveness is in decline, with soaring energy prices and industrial slowdown highlighting the urgency for structural reform and sustainable innovation across sectors.
• The new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is a step forward but remains problematic due to its complexity, loopholes, and uncertainty – undermining its potential to drive real harmonization and long-term investment.
• Data collection remains a bottleneck, plagued by inconsistent standards, a lack of supply chain coordination, and manual reporting burdens that disproportionately affect SMEs.
• Collaboration across the value chain is essential to overcome data challenges, with calls for standardization committees and shared responsibility in data transparency, quality, and confidentiality.
• Innovators are offering scalable solutions, such as Neptune Nanotechnologies’ recyclable high-barrier films and Sykell’s Circular ERP for end-to-end reuse tracking – demonstrating that sustainability and performance can coexist.
• Industry mindset must shift from reactive to proactive, treating packaging data and sustainability as core business priorities rather than compliance afterthoughts.

The report underscores a stark message: the packaging industry must act decisively, embracing radical transparency, deeper collaboration, and tech-enabled innovation to meet upcoming regulatory and sustainability targets. Future success will hinge on transforming today’s burdens into tomorrow’s competitive advantages – and doing so before it’s too late.

So many valuable and in-depth conversations were held at the Sustainable Packaging Summit this year. To give you a taste, this edition of the Brief provides a snapshot of the onstage discussions, from regulatory limitations to data collection to start-up pitches.

Daunting questions

Opening the event was the ‘Mapping the Sustainability Challenge’ panel with Francesca Siciliano Stevens, secretary general at EUROPEN; Hans van Bochove, head of EU Affairs at The Heineken Company; Bruno Van Gompel, founder and managing director of VGV Management Services; and our very own brand director, Tim Sykes.

Twenty years ago, Stevens explained, the European Union’s share of the global GDP was 31.4%, making it the largest economy in the world. Now it falls third in the rankings, surpassed by China and the United States – representing only 15.2% of worldwide GDP.

When it comes to European competitiveness, Stevens echoed such voices as former Prime Minister of Italy Mario Draghi’s in the call to relaunch Europe’s competitiveness. “Either we go for radical change,” she said, “or we accept slow agony.”

She described the current situation as “terrifying” and asserted that it “require[s] a complete change of the way we operate – not just in the way we operate business, but […] a total new level of engagement also from the business community in modifying the patterns that we have been following until now that clearly are not working.”

For example, she drew a correlation between German industrial decline and soaring energy prices. In France, she placed the price of electricity at €128; in Germany, this rises to €820. Reportedly, the situation has forced Germany to reutilize coal and lignite power plants, despite its commitments to transition away from nuclear energy – yet all European countries are facing a similar struggle as prices keep hiking up.

While he was optimistic that the industry now has a Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), rather than just a Directive – one that, theoretically, applies consistently across all Member States and implements the full waste hierarchy – van Bochove stated that “it is difficult to dissect what exactly regulation is asking” of a company when it is already under pressure from investors, NGOs, and the media.

So, too, did he describe the PPWR as “not the prettiest”; it is full of exemptions and derogations for Member States, which he feared could compromise harmonization. All the ambiguity, uncertainty, and loose ends currently left to secondary legislation is a “killer” for investment, in his view.

“You will hear a lot of negativity about the PPWR,” van Bochove said, “and it’s all true.

“At the same time, it is at least something that we can navigate and, indeed, develop a more sustainable future for packaging.”

Van Gompel proceeded to ask various questions of the audience in the context of sustainability-minded action:

• Regarding such issues as financial constraints, “how are you going to continue the momentum in these adverse times?”
• “Do you see a future where sustainability is a competitive advantage? What is the right balance between sustainability and competitiveness? If you believe that sustainability can be that competitive edge, what actions will you take?”
• “Are you ready to convert [regulatory] challenges into innovation opportunities?”
• “Are we prepared to scale successful pilots into industry-wide solutions?”
• “Are you willing to share your learnings, your resources, and your efforts in order to get this going, and are you truly collaborating across the supply and value chain?”

As the Summit commenced, he recommended that attendees be “curious”, “open”, and “proactive”, and “ask the hard questions” wherever necessary.

Laborious processes

“How can we leverage the reporting headache into an opportunity?” asked moderator Renata Daudt from AWEN Packaging Consulting as she hosted ‘The Reporting Headache’ on the Strategy Stage. She observed that it is “a big challenge to get accurate data across the value chain” – a sentiment that the talk’s attendees agreed with, summing up the task with words like “complex”, “overwhelming”, “tsunami”, and “nightmare”.

PreZero Sustainable Packaging’s Alexander Reitz voiced companies’ frustrations that creating reports takes a lot of work. Right now, employees must undergo the manual process of calling and writing emails to suppliers, which relies on the cooperation of both parties.

Trevor Yong from Aura also touched on this concern about supplier engagement; “if you and your supply chain do not agree on the objective, you will fail. It can’t be a once-a-year outreach.

“We should perhaps think more about proactively talking pre-competitively or with our supply chains now about what we need in the future so we are not retrospectively trying to repair damage.

“Let’s address the problem as proactively as we can.”

Yet Michelle Carvell from Lorax Compliance provided the other side’s perspective, suggesting that there is a lack of understanding among different industry players. When a supplier is asked to provide data, are they expected to supply all the data they have, or only what is relevant to the report in question? Which data is collected at what time? What is the minimum requirement today versus in the future, and which is the first step forward?

Different players operate under different internal systems, Carvell explained, and may have limited information access if they are importing items – they may not even realize they need to report at all. With so many unknowns and variables and no standardized expectation of data collection, “the gap is huge.”

Indeed, as Henkel’s Philippe Blank underlined, big organizations at least have the money and workforce to dedicate solely to maintaining data – a luxury that SMEs literally cannot afford. Yong expressed similar sympathy for every player in a supply chain; “everyone is panicking, because they simply have no idea how to get accurate data.”

He asked the audience: “Is your organization burying its head in the sand and hoping that someone else will pick up this challenge? If you are thinking that, I would suggest there’s a big problem and we need to address it quickly.”

Representing Plastic Recyclers Europe, Mathilde Taveau pointed to RecyClass as an example of collaboration across the value chain and a model for taking a proactive approach to data collection in the future. She suggested the creation of a standardization committee as a means of producing accurate data.

Still, while she emphasized that it can be very difficult to compromise and bring everyone’s ideas to the table, all parties in a value chain must be represented to ensure that the relevant data is generated.

Sharing data along value chain is key, according to Blank; in his view, data must be “super-granular” when it comes to disclosures. But even as he described the PPWR as an “overarching burden that everybody is waiting for”, he believed that the industry is “not there yet” when it comes to data collection requirements. It is not a matter that can wait for secondary legislation in 2028, he warned, or else the 2030 targets will be missed.

Blank added that the information passed along the chain needs to be accurate, but also confidential. Reitz disagreed, comparing data sharing to listing a product’s ingredients on the back of food packaging and stating that it is “not that groundbreaking”.

As Yong and Carvell agreed, organizations should consider their packaging data before the product reaches the shelf and is subject to tax. Doing so is set to reduce errors and save businesses from later damage control. Indeed, Reitz said that collecting data where it is created (or as closely as possible), then passing it along the value chain as needed, is the “most accurate, most convenient, and most efficient way to do it”.

However, the process isn’t always so simple, depending which information is required and where/when it needs to be recorded. Accuracy is also a challenge – who is going to check and certify all the data collected? According to Blank, it is up to the company itself to ensure that the data is current and correct; but as Yong counteracted, this may be harder for smaller players.

Going forward, he encouraged industry members to review their existing processes, patch up any shortcomings, and treat the makeup of a pack as seriously as they would a food dish served to a customer.

Carvell pointed out that some organizations, e.g. co-manufacturers, need to be brought into the conversation and briefed about data reporting; “if they’re changing, repacking, adding packaging, they may need to be involved here because we can sometimes lose the movements of the products in the co-manufacturing process.”

In all, the panel revealed that there is no one harmonized approach, but collaboration is important to keep track of the right data.

New ideas

On a more optimistic level, we saw an array of start-up pitches on the Innovation Stage this year – including presentations from newsfeed regulars like Ecoshell and Kelpi, and another from Sustainability Award winner Pulpatronics.

In Neptune Nanotechnologies’ showcase, founder and CEO Aaron Guan warned that over 25 million tons of new plastic packaging films are produced every year, he said, with “almost all” of it ending up in landfill or the ocean. Within that production process, manufacturers face the dilemma of producing high-barrier plastic packaging at the expense of its recyclability, or sacrificing its airtight and water-resistant properties but producing a recyclable pack.

Neptune’s solution is to extract chitin nanocrystals from crustacean shells. Reportedly, these crystals are ten thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair yet stronger than steel, lighter than plastic, and impermeable. When dispersed into a film, the resultant material combines impermeability with recyclability.

Alongside better performance and sustainability – chemicals, adhesives, and multiple lamination layers are all unnecessary with this solution, the pitch claimed – Guan argued that the nanocrystals come at a lower price point. Beyond just plastics, it can also be used in epoxy resin or paper packaging; a “couple of percent” of nanocrystals in a paper pack is said to triple its strength, even when wet, and eliminate chemical additives like PFAS by achieving oil and water resistance.

Additionally, Sykell’s co-founder and CEO Davide Mazzanti uplifted its Circular ERP software, which tracks containers across supply chains from point of sale to checking for reuse, all on one automated platform.

Notably, he emphasized that Circular ERP’s ‘reverse supply chain’ tracking does not stop at the customer, but follows a product on its route back to the original supplier. He stated that packs do not need to be serialized for the software to unlock full visibility – revealing where a reusable container has been, its number of uses, how quickly an end user has returned it, any containers lost in the chain, etc.

Rather than requiring businesses to chase information across different departments, the software automates tracking into a single process that a user and its partners can follow; data is transferred among DHL and local truck drivers in real-time.

In 2023, Sykell launched the Einwach Mehrweg automated open reuse system. So far it has run in over 3,800 supermarkets and recirculated over two million pieces of packaging with Circular ERP. According to a verified LCA, one Einfach Mehrweg container generates an average of 91% less waste during a 50-use life cycle than 50 single-use packages.

Mazzanti cited Zerooo as a customer, with Circular ERP enabling it to serialize, track and trace which partners utilize their reusable beauty and cosmetic product packaging with which products. Similarly, Swiss packaging provider reCIRCLE has used the software to undertake order invoicing, warehousing, and logistics in one platform.

Highlighting the solution’s compatibility with existing deposit systems, Mazzanti hopes that Circular ERP can first prevent plastic pollution from worsening, then improve it by instilling wide-scale circularity over isolated initiatives and pilots.

Summit attendees can rewatch every talk in its entirety on the Sustainable Packaging Summit app. Alternatively, Packaging Europe members can watch the Summit livestreams on our website.