How supplier collaboration, investing in data can help brands’ EPR transition
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Brands, suppliers and other packaging stakeholders in between are still hungry for insights into emerging extended producer responsibility for packaging programs. At Pack Expo International, key voices in that state-by-state scale-up sought to educate large attendee crowds about what brands need to know and how suppliers can help.
Michael Okoroafor, chief sustainability officer at seasonings and condiments company McCormick & Co., framed the significance of EPR in the context of climate science and how packaging contributes to scope 3 emissions, which affects CPGs’ 2025 and 2030 emissions reduction commitments.
“If you need to decarbonize the planet, you need to make sure that you decarbonize packaging, and that's why EPR is critical,” he said during a panel discussion Tuesday about how suppliers can help brands complying with new EPR programs. This effort requires brand owners, material companies and others, said Okoroafor, who also participates in Maryland’s EPR advisory council.
Neil Menezes, a CPG sustainability professional who also serves as vice chair of the producer responsibility organization Circular Action Alliance, noted there are opportunities for non-producers to get involved with the PRO, too. One way is in helping influence ecomodulation as rulemaking occurs for EPR laws that have already passed.
Suppliers will play an important role in helping brand owners source data, noted Menezes, packaging sustainability policy manager at General Mills.
For instance, he said that while companies buy certain materials like films by linear feet, EPR programs work off of weight. Menezes said General Mills has worked closely with suppliers to understand that conversion.
One lesson that Menezes took from experience in Canada, especially with flexible packaging, is that having calculations off by just 5% or 10%, when multiplied by millions of units, can result in paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra fees.
General Mills has spent the last four years cleaning up its data, Menezes said.
In a separate presentation on Tuesday, Clorox Packaging & Sustainability Data Steward Kristin Speck detailed the company’s five-year journey to better track and understand its sustainability data amid the passage of state EPR laws. That period has also seen new PCR laws and Clorox joining the voluntary commitment group the U.S. Plastics Pact and being a signatory of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.