Collaborative Headway in Sustainable Packaging

After decades of going it alone, coffee and tea companies are working together to achieve sustainable solutions for the most vexing challenges in product packaging

By Peter Keen

Coffee and tea packaging have two distinct and occasionally conflicting priorities:

• Functional: Structure, shape, flavor flow, physical integrity, weight, shelf life, convenience, and aesthetics. Pyramid tea bags are an example. The emphasis on functional innovation is to attract customers. Development is essentially competitive.

• Environmental: Material safety, disposability, and waste reduction. The focus is to place environmental and social impact at the very center of innovation while aiming to maintain and enhance functionality. The overriding goal is to reduce how long waste packaging lives on, even where that adds cost to producer and consumer. The emerging trend here is collaborative.

In general, the two forces move in harmony. The materials that are becoming the main environmental innovation base also protect against leaching of chemicals and offer the highest degree of healthiness: unbleached paper, cornstarch PLA, and non-GMO plants. One surprisingly far-reaching development has been to replace the metal staple that seals the bag and is tied to the string and tag with organics and heat seals. It’s a major barrier to full compostability of bags and a potential health risk. Here, functionality and environmental concern come together.

Conflicts are generally minor: unbleached paper doesn’t have the attractive brightness of treated paper and the industry – as with plastic straws and recycling – has not substantially increased consumer awareness of and willingness to take the trouble to adopt home composting.

OSC2: Open source collaboration

One of the most striking and promising areas of collaboration in packaging is OSC2. It stands for “One Step Forward to Organic, Sustainable Community” – hence OSC squared. The logic, as with Fair Trade and the Rainforest Alliance, is that all the major players share the same goals and that they should share resources in the interests of their joint social contribution. It’s appropriate that one of the central driving forces is Numi, in itself a strong innovator in packaging, including bottling. Its founders explain their philosophy and business strategy as based on principles of community, an ethos that drives collaborative innovation.

OSC2 was formed in 2013 to remove petroleum-based plastics from the environment. It currently has 25 members, centered on the West Coast of the United States. It has adopted an open-source strategy. This was the base for the original internet and encourages decentralized development, licensed use, and collaborative investment in products. It does not directly rely on standards or point to specific product configurations.

There’s a wide range of open-source, self-regulating alliances, including for seed sharing, drug discovery, and textbook use.

OSC2 has followed a systematic program, with compostable film its major emphasis:

• Worked with packaging partners from outside the tea, coffee, food, and spice industries to develop a set of compostable structures

• Tested six of these with members’ 18 different ingredients, “to radically advance our technical understanding of compostable materials” (OSC2 website, 2019, Partnering Collaborative)

• Supported the launch of the first compostable package by a member food brand

• Built a diverse advisory team of leaders in various aspects of packaging, such as: Futumura, with its materials and specialty packaging film and their NatureFlex line of cellulose products sourced from sustainably managed forests which is a market standout; Numi, the tea firm that has from its inception been among the pace-setters in packaging; Novamont, advanced bioplastics and biochemicals; and Alter Eco with its organic and non-GM foods.

• Helped reduce pricing of compostable packaging

• Developed a certification framework for compostables

• Hosted awareness-building and educational events

None of this is a quick fix. Numi’s report captures the sustained evolution the individual leaders have had to progress through and points to where OSC2 is an accelerator: recyclable cardboard outer packaging made of 85% post-consumer waste, soy-based ink, filter-paper substitution for nylon or GMO-plants in sachets, elimination of plastic shrink-wrapping of boxes or pallets. Individually, these are operational minutiae. It needs formal top management leadership to make them an integrated strategic unity.

The drink is, for now, the packaging forever

It is not at all surprising that decompostable film is such a priority. Coffee and tea packaging are not a minor element in an industry of small containers and servings. It’s a large producer of “forever” waste items – ones that won’t go away by themselves.

That makes new material development and application part of the broader urgency in moving from fossil fuels to renewable sources and reduction of the accumulation of waste that is largely non-biodegradable. One single-use coffee pod or tea bag is not an environmental threat. The 10 billion K-cups sold annually will be around in the oceans – the final dumping point – and landfills for as long as 400 years.

One of those vivid measures aimed at jolting people to see the scale of the petroleum-based plastics problem states that if assembled as a chain, these coffee pods would circle the globe 10 times. The 16 billion plastic food and beverage pouches produced in a single year would reach 48,000 miles into the sky piled one on one. Instead, 78,000 tons are living on in municipal landfills where they are the largest part of waste, 30% of the total.

There’s already been continued progress by individual companies in reducing but not solving the problem. Just about every major player now uses unbleached paper and mostly plastic-free composition. Only 70-80% of this improved material is fully compostable, however. For instance, many are treated with heat-resistant polypropylene, used as a sealant to keep the bag intact and in shape. When the paper decomposes, the net part remains on the compost pile.

Even the printing on tags, bags and boxes can be an impediment. Decompostable printing is a necessary concomitant of cellulose and bioplastics. Other promising lines of development include overwraps (envelopes, box protectors, wraps for combining individual units, such as shrink wrapping), stand up pouches, new laminates, polylactic acid compounds, and renewable materials.

There are several common themes emerging across the developments:

Urgency: A common complaint in the early 2000s was that manufacturers treated packaging as a minor concern. The petroleum industry was providing a flow of plastics that were cheap, easy to work with, and excellent for maximizing product shelf life. Why change? Plastics are now a visible, massive, and global blight. The quality brands are making it a strategic issue of social importance. Consumers are increasingly regarding natural and degradable/decompostable materials as a requirement not an option.

GMO-free: Genetically-modified crops are excluded from consideration by the packaging leaders. One of the blockages to wide adoption of corn starch for pillow tea bags was that there was limited availability of non-GMO supplies.

Responsive self-regulation: It is striking and encouraging that the leaders in the attack on the forever element of packaging have taken the initiative rather than wait to be pushed by regulators.