DuPont Says Sustainable Packaging is a Priority

A vice president with DuPont, Wilmington, Del., has stated in a speech at an industry event that eliminating packaging waste and working toward a future where all packaging is recycled or its value is recovered is a company goal.

 “The packaging industry has long focused on reducing to the minimum necessary packaging, but this is not enough – we can do more through innovation,” said William F. Weber, vice president and general manager of DuPont Packaging & Industrial Polymers, speaking during the keynote address at the Packaging Strategies CEO Summit, which took place in Clearwater, Fla., in late February.

“Packaging provides value in preventing costly food waste,” Weber commented, “and in the future all packaging can provide added value through recycle and recovery.”

The executive also remarked that energy recovery rather than materials recycling is part of what DuPont has in mind. “By broadening our thinking about what recycling means from a narrow focus on physical recycling to a broad suite of solutions that includes capturing the energy in packaging through waste-to-energy or the nutrient value of food and packaging through composting, we can deliver sustainable value to our customers, to consumers and to the world. This must be our goal as an industry going forward,” said Weber.

Weber also outlined DuPont’s approach to sustainable growth. He described sustainable packaging as an important focus area for DuPont and called on the packaging industry to take three actions:

·         Develop new technologies that will enable broad recycling in the future. Examples include waste-to-energy and better sorting technologies.

·         Set standard measurement and reporting metrics that communicate the footprint for packaging products and the end-of-life recommended disposal method.

·         Support the cap-and-trade approach as a way to establish clear, predictable market-based requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, providing a clear pathway to rapid transformational change to a “low-carbon economy.”

According to Weber, collaboration will be critical to developing technologies and systems for end-of-life solutions that enable this vision, with the economic environment making collaborative innovation especially important now.

“We absolutely must drive waste from the packaging value chain. Initiatives to cut waste will yield improved sustainability as well as cost-effectiveness,” Weber said.