Seven sustainable packaging predictions

Packaging Digest's sister publication Plastics Today asks Tony Kingsbury, the Dow Chemical executive-in-resident at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, about  the current state of the sustainable packaging market and where it's headed. Kingsbury begins his assessment with a good news/bad news scenario based on a statistic from the United Nations: The earth will have 9 billion human inhabitants by 2050. On the positive side for a company such as Dow that's a lot of people who will require a lot of stuff; on the negative side, however, all that stuff requires resources, which in some cases are becoming scarce.

"As the world grows more affluent, will we have the resources to meet the needs of nine billion people?" Kingsbury asks. "The answer is no. Big changes will be required, rethinking of entire systems." One such system, according to Kingsbury, is landfills.

"One hundred years from now, people will say, 'How stupid were people that they put all these concentrated resources into things called landfills?'" Kingsbury says, noting that today's landfill will be tomorrow's resource mine.

Prediction #1: Resource efficient packaging will win
"It's not just the bottle, it's how it fits into the overall scheme, from production to shipping," Kingsbury said, explaining that the key drivers will be carbon and water. "We're not just running out of water, we're running out of clean water," Kingsbury said

To read Kingsbury's other 6 predictions for the sustainable packaging market, visit plasticstoday.com for the complete article.