Course correct for a sustainable future

In business, it’s critical to have a clear vision and goals. You then need to define clear strategies to attain your goals with the best available information at that time. However – to be successful, you must be agile to adapt and refine both your strategies and goals as the world around you changes. Circumstances change. New information is discovered. New knowledge is developed. We have to adeptly take this new information into account and adjust our course to get to our goals in the most effective and efficient way. If we don’t adapt, we’ll end up off-course and achieve a goal that is no longer relevant in today’s world.

Many businesses’ sustainability goals were defined years ago. In the meantime, our knowledge about climate change has improved. The goals, however, have arguably not kept up. We all want to stop climate change. That is clear, but how we get there may need to be adjusted so we achieve our ultimate goals faster.

Let’s say your packaging material is the “right” kind of plastic that actually can be recycled. Great, you can now correctly state that your packaging is 100% recyclable, but it doesn’t take much poking before a hole appears in the neat communication story. How many times can your packaging be recycled before it is incinerated or ends up on a landfill or in our waterways? The truth is that most plastics in packaging can only be recycled up to around 3 times before it degrades so much that it cannot be used any longer. Many composite packaging materials like a liquid carton can in theory be recycled, but are so difficult and non-economical to separate that it is very often downcycled, shipped to a landfill or incinerated. For this type of complex composite packaging, there is a significant difference between what can be recycled in theory and what is actually recycled in practice. To be blunt, the “100% recyclable packaging” goal may be easy to communicate, make consumers feel good, and give your brand a healthy green glow, but it may not do much to preserve our environment.

Using recycled content in plastics is a step in the right direction, but we need to take this goal to the next level as well – for two reasons. Firstly, as mentioned, plastics can only be recycled less than a handful of times before it degrades beyond usability. It’s simply not a long-term solution that will have real sustainable impact. The second reason is that plastics are not recycled enough to provide an adequate supply of recycled material. The recycling rate for plastics is a paltry 9%, which means there is not enough plastics to go around for brands to reach their goals.

We need to shift the focus away from plastics altogether. Recycled content in and of itself is not a bad thing, but it depends on the material. Again, permanent materials, like metal and glass, recycle forever without degrading during the process. As mentioned, they are circular and stay in the loop forever when recycled.

I’m all for keeping it light, but we still need to scrutinize the choices this focus forces brands to take. Paper and plastics are generally lighter than metal and glass. I can’t argue with that, but that’s not the full story. I know I will sound like a broken record, but since permanent materials like metal recycle forever, their circular cradle-to-cradle carbon footprint is usually lower than that of plastics and liquid cartons. That’s because the life-cycle is infinitely longer for metals. The materials stay in the loop and help enable a circular economy. My colleague, Jenny Wassenaar, wrote a great white paper outlining the evolution of life cycle assessments and their differences.

Many of the big brands’ sustainability goals need to move on from “just” recyclability to circularity. The goals need to move from single use cradle-to-grave to the circular cradle-to-cradle life cycle assessments which more accurately reflect the environmental impact of a material over its full lifespan.

If we don’t evolve our goals, we will not effectively combat climate change. We must be adept at evolving as the future of our planet depends on it.