Cross industry position paper of flexible packaging value chain: “Progress in Packaging Circularity only possible with forward-looking and progressive Policies”

Several organisations representing the flexible packaging value chain in Europe call upon European legislators to provide a progressive and forward-looking definition of packaging recyclability, befitting of a circular economy for all categories of packaging formats and materials.

Flexible packaging represents at least half of food primary packaging placed on the EU market (in product units) while accounting for only one sixth of packaging material used (in weight). This fact demonstrates the key function of flexible packaging, which is to protect valuable products with the smallest amount of material. In this way, flexible packaging helps save resources, resulting in less material in packaging waste streams by weight.

Life cycle assessment studies show that, because of its very efficient use of material, flexible packaging is characterised by low overall environmental impacts, especially carbon footprint. Full recyclability will improve those environmental performances even further. Any future legislation should help maintain the resource efficient design of flexible packaging and enable it to be increasingly recyclable and achieve full circularity.

To achieve a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, the flexible packaging value chain calls upon legislators in Europe and the Member States to create an appropriate and stable legislative framework which enables investments in packaging design as well as in capacities and advanced technologies for recycling.

More details in the full position paper

 

The undersigning organisations are:

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Sustainability

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