The Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) has launched a new ‘Future of Packaging’ White Paper, which aims to support a more strategic and proactive role for the food industry in packaging sustainability.

The AFGC developed the white paper in consultation with stakeholders including government, retailers, packaging manufacturers, recyclers and consumers, to drive more strategic and tangible action on packaging sustainability.

The White Paper identifies actions that will be taken by AFGC and its stakeholders to go ‘beyond compliance’ with the APC and to address broader waste and sustainability impacts and opportunities related to increasing sustainable packaging.

According to the AFGC, while significant progress has been made towards sustainability, for example through lightweighting of packaging and higher recycling rates, a number of challenges remain. These include:

• a continuing focus on waste and litter, which may mean that other important sustainability issues are being overlooked or even exacerbated;

• a generally poor understanding of the important role that packaging plays in delivering products to consumers and the implications of this for sustainability.

The AFGC’s White Paper considers both of these issues within a sustainability framework.

New government policies for packaging are currently being considered through the Packaging Impacts Consultation Regulation Impact Statement (RIS), which was released for comment in December 2011. The aim of the RIS is to explore measures that have potential to increase packaging resource recovery rates and decrease packaging litter.

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