Sustainable food packaging: the best examples
We have been saying it for a long time: companies are finally paying the right attention to the use of environmentally friendly packaging, especially when it comes to food and sustainable food packaging.
Indeed, the transition to more careful packaging solutions is a crucial step in addressing environmental challenges and promoting sustainable development in the food sector.
Increasingly aware of the impact of their business on the environment, companies are incentivizing the adoption of sustainable packaging as a way of demonstrating a real commitment, while at the same time complying with increasingly stringent environmental regulations.
Not only that, consumers themselves are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of their purchasing choices. Statistically, more and more people prefer to buy sustainably packaged products with a lower environmental impact.
Companies are therefore forced to respond to this market demand, by adopting sustainable packaging solutions to meet consumer needs.
The Tetra Pak innovation
The focus on sustainable food packaging has experienced a substantial increase over the last decade, confirming the importance of and need for a more environmentally friendly approach not only to the environment, but also to food itself.
Before today, however, the commitment to a more sustainable approach was far less. So where does this sudden change in trajectory come from?
To understand this, we have to go back more than a decade, 72 years to be precise: it was in 1951 when Ruben Rausing introduced Tetra Classic, the first beverage carton packaging whose tetrahedral shape was ideal for optimizing space.
In the same year, together with his son Gad, Ruben Rausing founded Tetra Pak, with the aim of creating packaging solutions capable of preserving the freshness and quality of food and at the same time creating light, compact and easily recyclable packaging.
Tetra Pak introduced the first tetrahedron-shaped carton packaging in 1952, known as ‘Tetra Brik’, which has become an icon of the food packaging industry. This type of packaging revolutionized the industry, offering greater convenience, food safety and durability of packaged products.
Its legacy is still visible today: Tetra Pak continues to be a key player in the supply of sustainable food and beverage packaging.
Sustainable food packaging: from objective to certainty
However, every innovation, in order to be consolidated as such, must strengthen the entire sector in which it operates over an extended period of time.
This is why in 2003 Tetra Pak sealed a very important agreement with Comieco on the separate collection of beverage cartons and its communication on a national level.
The communication of sustainability thus begins to be linked to a concrete gesture, with the aim of eradicating the mistaken belief that labels it as an enemy of companies, as a burden or imposition.
The adoption of sustainable food packaging thus becomes a positive choice for everyone involved in the sector: companies, buyers and the environment.
An agreement, the one between Comieco and Tetra Pak, which also provides for a real operational program for the separate collection of paper-based multi-packaging.