While biodegradable and eco friendly packaging design options offer many benefits, bringing innovative designs to widespread commercial use presents significant technical and adoption challenges. Here are some of the key issues innovators must address to make sustainable packaging viable:
Meeting Functional Requirements
Plastic packaging has become so prevalent because it offers attributes like moisture and gas barrier properties, strength, flexibility and shelf stability that are difficult for biodegradable materials to match. Developing fully compostable alternatives that can protect products as effectively through warehousing, transportation and retail display is an engineering challenge.
Properties like impact resistance, heat sealing parameters, printability and ability to be processed at high speeds on packaging machinery must align with industry standards. Ensuring barrier functions and structural integrity over complete product lifecycles requires extensive research and product testing that drives up development costs.
Achieving Compostability
For a material to be called truly compostable, it must break down completely within a maximum 180 days timeframe. However, rates of biodegradation can vary greatly depending on conditions like ambient temperature, moisture levels, carbon/nitrogen ratios and microbial populations within targeted disposal facilities.
Obtaining certification from independent bodies like TUV Austria or meeting ASTM D6400 standards requires proving consistent, full degradation under controlled industrial composting conditions. This is challenging to demonstrate across all disposal scenarios and inhibits labeling claims.
Feedstock Availability
Sourcing sufficient raw materials is another hurdle. While agricultural residues represent abundant renewable resources, there are harvest periods, logistics of waste collection and pre-processing requirements to produce uniform feedstocks that impact supply consistency and costs.
Ensuring supplies can meet capacity demands as packaging use scales requires partnerships spanning distributed waste streams. Shortages disrupt production planning and marketing launches. Stability depends on consistent agricultural yields which weather patterns may impact.
Production Economics
The capital costs of building bioplastic manufacturing plants and optimizing extraction processes from cellular biomass feedstocks is high. Unit costs for alternative materials generally exceed petroleum-based plastics today, presenting a barrier to widespread industrial conversion and adoption by consumer brands.
Mass production techniques must bring biopolymer costs competitive with fossil-based materials to achieve parity on shelves. This challenge is exacerbated by smaller current volumes and production which have yet to achieve economies of scale.
Consumer Acceptance
Perhaps the biggest hurdle is gaining sufficient marketplace acceptance from both brands and consumers. While eco-consciousness is rising globally, wholesale biodegradable packaging is deeply entrenched and equated with product protection, convenience and affordability.
Perceptions of reduced performance, higher costs or learning new disposal habits act as deterrents versus familiar plastic solutions. Massive marketing campaigns are required to change long-held routines and shift social norms surrounding plastic usage.
End of Life Infrastructure
For biodegradable materials to deliver on sustainability promises, infrastructure must support their full life cycles from production to disposal. While industrial composting facilities exist in many regions, operations are not available universally nor can they handle all materials equally.
Likewise, public collection frameworks, technologies for sorting compostable items from waste streams and signage educating proper disposal remain lacking in most municipalities. This inhibits the “circular” reuse of wholesale biodegradable packaging drives their eco-advantage.
