In keeping with the society-wide movement toward environmental sustainability, consumers are demanding less packaging. A new study indicates, however, that this trend won’t translate into less spending on packaging in the coming year. Of 250 CPG brand owners polled, 75 percent reported that they plan on spending more on packaging over the next year, according to a study conducted by L.E.K. Consulting. These numbers demonstrate a notable increase from 65 percent in 2018 and 40 percent in 2017. While 85 percent of respondents said that they had been working toward changing packaging materials to make them more recyclable, there were other significant trends in the packaging landscape discussed in the study which all require investment in innovation. CPG companies have made moves into easier-to-open packaging (57 percent), single-serve packaging (51 percent) and packaging with different formats, printing and textures to match the new, premium products that they contain. The general public has become more aware of the problems of excessive packaging in recent years for a numerous reasons, one being the tremendous volume of boxes and packaging waste generated by shopping via e-commerce. Amazon.com, in an attempt to curtail some of this, has instituted rules for its sellers requiring streamlined packaging and is imposing punishment in the form of fines for those who fail to use it, reports Mashable. These restrictions are not solely for reasons of sustainability, though, as bulky packaging from vendors also leads to additional shipping weight for Amazon if it is holding the inventory, driving up costs for the e-tail giant. At least one startup has even attempted to close the gap by creating reusable versions of packaging for major CPG brands that can be left on the front porch and picked up for re-use. Loop, a “circular” e-commerce platform created by startup TerraCycle, entered into partnerships with Walmart and Kroger earlier this year for pilots in four cities. CPG companies are in some instances pioneering different versions of packaging for products sold direct-to-consumer. Proctor & Gamble, for example, released a lighter, sturdier box of Tide specifically to be purchased and delivered from Amazon.com.  

NEWBURYPORT — Two local high school students and two senior community members were honored for their volunteer efforts at the annual Generations of Giving ceremony Wednesday.   About 25 people, some of whom were former Generations of Giving honorees, gathered at the Senior Community Center for the ceremony, which is held during each year’s Yankee Homecoming celebration and recognizes local residents young and old who have made a difference by donating their time and energy.   This year’s senior volunteer winners were Bob Peters and Don Beaulieu, who were honored alongside youth winners Kylie Lorenzo and Anna Cameron.   Peters, 85, has spent a decade packing and delivering meals each weekday for the area’s hungry residents as part of Newburyport’s Meals on Wheels program. On the weekends, Peters and his friends also help feed the area’s hungry residents, house its homeless and perform minor repairs for people in need.   During the ceremony, Peters shared some wise words from his grandmother, who encouraged him to help those around him from a young age.   “I can remember my grandmother saying to me when I was so young, I could barely walk. She said, ‘If you can do something for somebody, do it and don’t even think about it, and it comes back to you a hundredfold,’” Peters said.   Beaulieu served as a Salisbury selectman for three terms, and volunteered on the Warrant Advisory Committee and the Triton School District Subcommittee. He volunteered to record Salisbury town committee meetings and also works for Northern Essex Elder Transport, taking local seniors to medical appointments in Boston.   Cameron, a Newburyport High School junior, has volunteered at the city’s Recycling Center for several years and runs the “Free Corner,” which keeps usable items out of the city’s waste stream and gives them to new owners. She manages the TerraCycle collections and has helped with Toward Zero Waste Newburyport projects, including volunteering at the Repair Cafe.   Cameron was unable to attend the ceremony, but her mother, Susanne Cameron, spoke on her behalf. She praised her daughter’s dedication to volunteering and informed guests that Anna planned to donate her cash prize to charity.   “She is a tenacious volunteer,” Susanne Cameron said. “When most kids her age are sleeping on Saturday morning, she is at the Recycling Center in the snow, rain, cold and heat. ... She really believes in the spirit of volunteerism.”   Lorenzo, a senior at Triton Regional High School, has logged 120 volunteer hours at Anna Jaques Hospital’s patient information desk and in the patient transport department over the last three summers.   Lorenzo is a member of the Triton Community Service Club, through which she has volunteered for PTA meetings, the Salvation Army, elementary school events, road races and other events. When Lorenzo returns to school in the fall, she will be vice president of the student council.   At the ceremony, Lorenzo thanked her family, who she said “always encouraged me to give back.”   Richie Eaton, a former chair of Yankee Homecoming, also addressed the crowd Wednesday, shining a light on the volunteer spirit that he said drives Yankee Homecoming.   “Without the volunteers, you wouldn’t have Yankee Homecoming,” Eaton said. “Without volunteers, we’d be nothing. It’s so important to all of us.”   Staff writer Jack Shea can be reached via email at jshea@newburyportnews.com or by phone at 978-961-3154. Follow him on Twitter @iamjackshea.

On a recent Saturday morning, I answered my antsy 3-year-old’s request for a snack by digging into my bag and finding – to my relief – a pouch of applesauce. I snapped off the cap and handed it over, and he was content for the last few minutes of his sister’s violin class. Perhaps apple slices would have been more ideal, but I was glad to have the pouch on hand.   Since the introduction of baby food pouches about 10 years ago, they’ve claimed more of the market each year. Technavio, a market research firm, estimated in 2018 that global revenue from baby food pouches grew tenfold between 2010 and 2017 — from $16 million to $160.8 million. In 2017, the market research firm Mintel surveyed 1,000 households in the United States with young children and found that about half of kids 3 and under eat purees from pouches, and of these, 58 percent have one or more pouches per day.   As a parent and college nutrition instructor, my guess is that pouches are popular because they’re convenient, shelf-stable and usually more nutritious than other packaged snacks. While they’re mostly fruit and vegetable purees, they can include more interesting ingredients like chia seeds, chickpeas, millet, avocado and yogurt.   “They were great when my daughter was about 2 and so hungry at 5:30 when I picked her up from day care. It prevented many dinner-prep meltdowns,” said Melissa Marks, a biology professor in Salem, Ore. “I didn’t love the eco-unfriendly nature of them,” said Marks, “but they got this scientist mom through the final pre-tenure year.” While the pouches are not recyclable through municipal services, they can be mailed to TerraCycle at a cost of at least $65 per shipment, except for a few brands that have set up free mail-in programs with the recycling company. Pouch caps are collected in some locations by Preserve, which manufactures goods like toothbrushes and razors from recycled plastic.   The pediatric feeding experts I spoke with said that there’s nothing wrong with giving your kids pouches from time to time, but they’re worried that some families might be becoming too reliant on them. The pouches’ entry into the baby food market is so recent that there isn’t yet published research on their impact, but they are enough of a departure from traditional baby foods that they raise several theoretical concerns, including delaying motor development, diluting nutritional quality, and increasing picky eating and cavities in young kids.   One potential problem is that pouches may oversimplify the eating process, leaving fewer opportunities for babies to practice the oral and fine motor skills they need to use utensils and to eat more textured foods. For example, babies can suck from a pouch using similar mouth and tongue movements as when they breastfeed or drink from a bottle, said Jenny McGlothlin, M.S., a speech-language pathologist at the University of Texas at Dallas and coauthor of “Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating.” It’s better for babies to eat purees with a spoon, she said, so they can practice closing their lips over the utensil and moving food back in their mouths to swallow, and then advance to food with more texture as soon as they’re ready.   Pouched baby foods are marketed for babies as young as 4 months, and since they’re easy for babies to suck down, this might encourage parents to add too much pureed food to their babies’ diets too early. “As semi-liquids that could fill up the baby, they are not good nutritional substitutes for breastmilk or formula in early life,” said Dr. Steven Abrams, M.D., chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Nutrition. The A.A.P. advises parents to start offering solids to babies when they’re interested and developmentally ready to sit up and eat from a spoon, usually around 6 months.   Anecdotally, some professionals say they’re observing delays in motor development among kids overly dependent on the pouches. Ruth McGivern, M.A., a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Philadelphia, said that she and her colleagues had noticed that some of their toddler clients were learning to self-feed with a spoon later than usual, and that she was “pretty sure reliance on the pouches is part of the reason.” On its own, taking longer to learn to use a spoon wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, she said, but she worries that these toddlers are missing out on an important stage of food exploration.   “Without the opportunity to smear food all over their faces, and lick it off with their tongues, and wave the spoon around while they play with the food in their other hand, young toddlers tend to lose their curiosity about food and become more and more dependent on either the pouches or their parent spoon-feeding them,” said McGivern.   Research suggests that kids use all their senses to learn about food. Having the opportunity to see, smell and play with food can increase a toddler’s acceptance of new foods, according to studies published in the journal Appetite, and pouches don’t allow for that full sensory experience. Maryann Jacobsen, M.S, R.D., a coauthor of “Fearless Feeding,” recommended advancing from purees – like those in pouches – to more textured foods between 6 and 10 months so that babies can learn to chew and feed themselves finger foods.   Babies are most open to new tastes during a “golden window of opportunity” between 6 and 18 months, said McGlothlin. It’s a perfect time to get used to the bitterness of green vegetables, which can require repeated exposures. “If we don’t offer a variety of foods and experiences, then we’re setting ourselves up for pickiness later,” she said.   If vegetables are introduced to kids only in pouch form, their taste is probably masked. “When you’re mixing it with other flavors, there’s no guarantee that they’re able to taste it in the way that they need to in order to learn to like that flavor over time,” said Kameron Moding, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric nutrition at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, whose research has shown that most packaged baby and toddler vegetable products, including pouches, are blended with fruits or sweet vegetables.   Those sweet ingredients also mean the pouches are high in sugar. A study published this July in the journal Nutrients analyzed 703 pureed baby and toddler food products and found that pouched purees were often higher in sugar than baby food in other packages, like jars or plastic tubs. For example, among fruit and vegetable blend products, pouches had a median of 11 grams of sugar per serving, compared with 5 grams of sugar per serving in products with other packaging because the pouches both came in larger serving sizes and were more concentrated in sugar. Among the pouched blends, 58 percent had added sugar beyond that naturally present in fruits and vegetables, compared with 33 percent of the purees in other packaging.   “The higher the sugar content, the higher the risk of tooth decay,” said Dr. Joe Castellanos, D.D.S., immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. He recommends using pouches only in moderation, along with a good tooth brushing routine.   Despite these concerns, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional pouch, Jacobsen said. “It’s fine to use these,” she said. “It’s just when we overuse them and we rely on them too much, I think that’s when it becomes problematic.”   The experts I spoke with said that it’s impossible to give hard and fast rules on how many pouches is too many. Some kids who eat several pouches per day are still comfortable eating many other foods. However, if your kid is fussy when they can’t have a pouch; or if they refuse to eat more textured foods, or if they don’t want to use utensils or touch food with their hands, it’s a problem, McGlothlin said. A pediatric feeding specialist can do an evaluation to identify sensory or oral motor issues that may be contributing and help make a plan to broaden the child’s diet.   Although she’s concerned about overuse of pouches, McGlothlin, who’s also a mother of three, said that it’s not helpful to judge parents about how they feed their kids. “We’re all kind of just trying to do the best we can on a daily basis,” she said.   Pouches may be especially helpful for parents with disabilities, or for those who have little time for food prep and who might find that pouches are the most realistic way of getting fruits and veggies into their kids’ lunchboxes.   The same can be true for children with special needs. Katie Herzog, a mother in Novi, Mich., has a 4-year-old daughter who has significant feeding problems that require therapy. “Even as we add solid foods to her diet, the pouches are important to give her jaw a break,” Herzog said. Her daughter also has celiac disease, an autoimmune condition in which the body mounts an attack response against the small intestine after eating gluten, she said, so pouches can be given to her on the go without having to worry about wheat contamination.   For my part, I see parenting as both a short game and a long game. My long game that Saturday morning was to make a fragrant lentil and veggie curry that would simmer in the slow cooker all afternoon. I wasn’t sure if my son would eat much of it, but at least he would smell it, taste a bit of it, and watch his sister and parents enjoy it. But my short game? It might involve a pouch every now and then.

The receptacles will collect butts to be shipped for free to Terracycle, a company that helps connect hard-to-recycle waste with recycling programs funded by brands, manufacturers and retailers around the world. The cigarette waste will be melted into hard plastic that can be remolded into new products, like industrial plastic pallets and benches, while the ash and tobacco are separated and composted, according to the company’s website.

The receptacles will collect butts to be shipped for free to Terracycle, a company that helps connect hard-to-recycle waste with recycling programs funded by brands, manufacturers and retailers around the world. The cigarette waste will be melted into hard plastic that can be remolded into new products, like industrial plastic pallets and benches, while the ash and tobacco are separated and composted, according to the company’s website.

It’s challenging to change patterns. I feel strongly that we are responsible for not only the items we buy but the packaging it comes in. That plastic at the top of a tincture bottle I buy is my responsibility. So I invested in TerraCycle recycling boxes- I can put any plastic item in it and it will be upcycled. I am paying for an alternative to the landfill. It’s not the answer but a step in the right direction. But every time I take out the trash, I find plastic bits that me and my family members have thrown away because we are still learning to shift our patterns. My next step is to look at offsetting my carbon footprint. I drive an electric car but am on a plane often, which I know contributes to carbon emissions. I’m not ready to give up travel but I want to offset the pollution I am participating in creating.

Students, parents and community members gathered more than 18,000 recyclable items and sent them to TerraCycle, a recycling company in New Jersey. The school took second place in the Northeast region contest and won a playground made of recycled materials worth $25,000.

If you walk down any drugstore aisle, you become quickly aware of how plastic packaging enwraps most of the cosmetics and personal care products we use daily. Estimates of the cosmetics industry’s annual plastic packaging production range between 76.8 billion and 150 billion units.

Plastic packaging became the norm for the cosmetics industry starting in the 1950s due to its versatility in shape and size, as well as cultural shifts in the U.S. around hygiene and beauty that emerged during World War II. As showers became standard in Americans’ morning routines, so did the demand for liquid personal care products that could wash easily down the drain.

However, ongoing public outcry across the globe about plastics in oceans has encouraged cosmetics brands to rethink plastics and develop more responsible packaging. Notable cosmetic companies tackling the plastic packaging problem are L’Oréal and Garnier. For example, Garnier has teamed up with TerraCycle—a recycling and “upcycling” company that says it is determined to “eliminate the idea of waste”—to offer a take-back program for specific Garnier beauty products. L’Oréal signed with PureCycle Technologies, a company that uses waste plastic to produce virgin-like plastic, to get closer to its 2025 goal for 50 percent of its packaging plastics to be bio-sourced or of recycled origin.

While the work of Garnier and L’Oréal is a step in the right direction, their solutions do not remove plastic from the packaging equation entirely, nor do they remove the emissions from transportation further down the value chain.

'Carbon positive’ packaging: Sailing ships and regenerative forestry

Lush—a United Kingdom cosmetics company that boasts a line of package-free products—has developed what it calls a "carbon positive" packaging process that removes additional carbon dioxide from the air. The process does not use plastic packaging or container ships and results in what will encase some of Lush’s shampoo bars.

The packaging process is considered carbon-positive because it uses commercial sailboats instead of cargo ships to ship finished cork containers from Portugal to the United Kingdom. Lush also sources the cork at premium prices from forest owners who grow cork oak regeneratively.

“The [Lush] team’s calculations suggest that each cork pot sequesters over one kilo of carbon dioxide gas (and this is a very conservative estimate),” Miles King, a nature writer who works with Lush, told the Telegraph.

A revenue stream encouraging regenerative cork forests in Portugal

It is through Lush’s buying partnership with Eco Interventions, a nonprofit that works to restore Portugal’s Cork Oak forests, that regenerative practices have returned to the Portuguese cork industry. In recent years, forest owners’ ambitions to produce more cork have had a negative effect on the cork oaks’ well-being. Monte De Vida details how there has been a widespread die-off of cork oaks in Portugal due to a fungal disease and Portuguese cork harvesters’ excessive cultivation of land, which damages the shallow cork oaks’ roots and degrades the soil.

The 5 euros that Lush pays to Eco Interventions for each cork pot helps provide forest owners with the resources to cultivate native plants to replant around the trees and to transition away from pesticide usage. The 5 euros per container could quickly add up to bring meaningful change to the Portugal cork forest landscape, as Lush says it plans to purchase 500,000 cork containers by the end of the year.

Lush launches program that ships cork by sail

Lush also brought the regenerative philosophy of cork harvesting to the transportation portion of its “carbon positive” packaging process. The company launched a trial to ship 6,000 cork containers via a commercial sailing ship from Portugal to the United Kingdom at the beginning of July 2019.

“Transporting goods by sail cargo is a good fit with our ethics and ambition to reduce harm to the planet as it’s largely carbon neutral,” Derek Hallé, trade compliance manager for Lush U.K., told Fast Company.

At the same time, Lush is aware of the challenges of shipping by sailboat, such as the longer shipping time and lack of infrastructure that could increase costs drastically. It is important to Lush that acting ethically doesn’t get in the way of profitability, as it is essential in scaling up solutions such as shipping by sailboats. While shipping the containers by sail for now is unique to the cosmetics industry, entrepreneurs and academics believe the benefits of shipping cargo by sail will outweigh the challenges in the long run, according to Jeff Spross of The Week.

This process is a reminder that sustainable packaging requires a system reset—one that dares to redefine traditional logistics that make up not only the global cosmetics industry but also most other industries. Since 90 percent of what the global economy buys comes from container ships (which account for 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions) and 6.3 billion tons of plastic have found refuge in our oceans, more companies need to act on innovative transportation and material solutions similar to Lush’s process to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The more companies that try to reinvent their logistics with the environment in mind, the closer our global society is to finding regenerative solutions that can work in the long term.

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