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From Pellet to Product: How Packaging Can Reduce Your Environmental Impact

2 min read

Many brands face a complex challenge: how can they reduce a product's environmental impact without fundamentally changing the product itself. Reformulating a popular food recipe, for instance, is a major undertaking with risks to taste, quality, and supply chain integrity. So, where can businesses find opportunities for meaningful, non-disruptive improvement?

Often, the answer is packaging.

Why Packaging Matters

The container, tray, or film a product comes in is an untapped opportunity. Changing it can reduce environmental impact without touching the product itself. Even small improvements can add up.

For brands, packaging is now a significant lever for sustainability. It’s easier to act on than reformulating a product, and it can make a real difference.

Packaging Manufacturers Can Lead With Data

This is good news for packaging manufacturers. Clients across all sectors, from food and beverage to consumer goods, are now requesting robust environmental data. If you can provide a credible Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for your products, you stand out.

But packaging is complex. A plastic tray isn’t just “plastic.” It may be a mix of polymers, recycled content, and additives like colourants or stabilisers. Making it involves energy-intensive processes like cast extrusion or injection moulding.

Sustained helps manufacturers model these specifics. You can model your specific materials and processes to generate credible, audit-grade LCAs for the products you manufacture. This makes it easier to share accurate data with brands and show transparency.

For Brands, Packaging Is a Clear Opportunity

For an F&B or consumer goods brand, tackling the environmental footprint of packaging is a tangible way to make progress on sustainability goals. It allows for non-disruptive improvement, reducing a product's overall impact without altering the core formula that customers know and love.

By collaborating with packaging suppliers who can provide detailed LCAs, brands can:

  • Compare materials: See the difference between polymers or recycled content before committing to a change.
  • Strengthen eco-design: With 80% of a product's impact decided at the design stage, embedding accurate packaging data into the development process helps teams make better choices early.
  • Progress on targets: Reduce product footprint and get closer to corporate sustainability goals.

Creating a Common Language

Real progress needs collaboration. Brands and suppliers need a shared understanding of impact. Sustained now provides this common platform, creating a shared, transparent space where packaging producers and the brands they supply can speak the same language.

This enables true co-creation, a brand can ask, “What happens if we switch to a mono-material film?” The supplier can model the scenario and provide a data-backed answer in minutes, not weeks. This turns the relationship from a simple transaction into a partnership focused on reducing impact.

Why This Matters

Every product decision affects the environment. Packaging often has a hidden impact, but it’s also an area where action is realistic. Using accurate LCA data helps brands and manufacturers make better choices.

Sustained combines LCA with risk mapping, showing not only how products contribute to environmental harm, but also where operations depend on scarce resources. Brands can see where they are most vulnerable and where they can make improvements.

The Takeaway

Reducing environmental impact doesn’t always mean changing the product. Packaging is a powerful lever.

For brands, it’s a chance to make meaningful changes without disrupting the product. For manufacturers, it’s a way to differentiate and work more closely with clients.

With tools like Sustained, both sides can work from the same data, make informed decisions, and reduce environmental impact together.