Flexible by Name, Flexible by Nature: Flexible Packaging is the Solution to Waste Reduction Challenges

Published: November 3, 2025

Modern supply chains depend on packaging to protect and preserve products – especially food. Photo courtesy of Parkside.

By Julia O'Loughlin, Group Marketing Manager, Parkside Flexibles 

Given the often negative headlines that accompany stories about packaging waste, it’s easy to forget that packaging is designed to prevent waste, not to become waste itself.

The modern supply chain depends on packaging to protect and preserve products – especially food. Without it, the already serious food waste crisis – around a third of all food produced is wasted, according to the UN figures – would grow much worse.

This waste is responsible for 8-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions[1]. When considered against the fact that all plastic production is responsible for around 3 percent of emissions[2], this puts the critical need for functional packaging into perspective.

All of this creates a difficult balancing act for businesses looking to improve their environmental footprint. Packaging materials are just one piece of the puzzle – performance, format, and end-of-life options should also be considered. This is where flexible packaging can play a significant role, helping businesses solve their packaging dilemmas with future-proofed and functional solutions.

Routes to Success

There are several pathways to successfully reducing packaging waste. The EU’s incoming Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is a sweeping set of new packaging waste laws built around incentivizing businesses to adopt one of these pathways, which have been put into a ranked list – the waste hierarchy. Flexible packaging supports this hierarchy on a number of levels.

At the top of this list is minimization. As all packaging consumes some of the Earth’s resources during its lifetime – not just the materials used to manufacture it, but the energy used to transport it through the supply chain, the emissions it creates, and so on – the aim should be to keep that resource consumption to an absolute minimum.

Flexible packaging is inherently the most minimal format of packaging that exists. This format facilitates the removal of all but the most essential elements of a pack, prioritizing lean, hyper-efficient design.

This gets to the heart of lightweighted packaging. In many cases, this involves swapping a rigid pack with a flexible alternative, such as a pouch. It can also involve replacing an existing flexible material – usually a heavier-weight duplex, triplex, or even quadplex laminate – with a lighter or thinner grade of material. This reduces the need for excessive multi-laminate structures and enables the use of single laminate designs for many applications. While this requires a careful design process so as not to compromise product protection or the consumer experience, using material innovations to make small weight savings on each pack can add up to a huge difference to a business’s costs and carbon footprint when scaled across an entire packaging portfolio.

But delivering these lightweight and functional flexible packaging innovations is impossible without the cutting-edge converting machinery needed to produce them at scale. Ideas and goals are important to drive progress, but more important is the ability to make them a reality.

Swapping a rigid pack with a flexible alternative, such as a pouch, leads to lighter weight packaging. Photo courtesy of Parkside.

Production Line Efficiency

Fortunately, the term flexible packaging has more than one meaning. It doesn’t just refer to the material itself, but to the versatility it offers on the production line. Converters can use any number of application-led techniques that add functionality, consumer convenience, and value to the finished product. Crucially, this can be used to align flexible packaging with another step in the waste hierarchy – recyclability.

For example, laser scoring technology enables the creation of new lidding film solutions that are designed with the future of recycling in mind. There are several major issues affecting plastic recycling, one of which is consumer confusion around what can be dropped into their recycling bin, and another that stems from the technical challenges involved with multi-polymer soft plastics contaminating the waste stream.

When multiple polymers enter the recycling system, the quality of the recovered material at the end of the recycling process is likely to be highly variable, and it can contaminate other higher-grade plastics in the waste stream. This is a common challenge in many applications including lidding film, when peelable adhesive layers or stickers are often added to create easy-open functionality. Laser scoring offers an innovative solution to this problem by enabling the creation of an easy-opening scored directly into the lidding film. When using a monopolymer lidding film that is weld-sealed to a matching tray, the whole solution is suitable for recycling in domestic kerbside schemes.

Beyond Circularity

While the above demonstrates that there is far more to sustainability than swapping materials, flexible packaging does provide options in this area, too.

Paper-based flexible materials have become much more prominent in recent years. Paper has the highest recycling rate of any packaging material, with a recovery rate of almost 80 percent in Europe³. Advances in water-based barrier coatings and sealing layers mean that paper-based materials also offer improved functional performance that makes them a better fit for a wider range of food and non-food applications.

Another increasingly popular option is a switch to compostable materials. While they are a type of plastic, these materials are made from a bio-based feedstock (such as cellulose) that breaks down when exposed to the microbes present in compost heaps. Compostable materials can be certified as industrially compostable, meaning they only break down in an industrial composting facility, or home compostable, meaning they break down within a set timescale in a domestic compost heap or an industrial composting facility. Compostable materials enable businesses to think beyond circularity and embrace a cradle-to-cradle approach to packaging.

Depending on the application, compostable elements can be combined with recyclable components to create a hybrid solution that is still compatible with the waste hierarchy. For example, a compostable lidding film can be combined with a pulp tray to offer greater protection for sensitive produce applications.

The key is to ensure each solution is guided by the needs of the application. Packaging that does not protect its contents just creates more waste, no matter how sustainably it is designed. But this is at the heart of why flexible packaging success story. It is flexible by name, flexible by nature, offering an almost unlimited range of options and configurations that can be tailored to suit the exact needs of the application.

Packaging doesn’t have to be the sustainability villain. With a flexible approach, it can be the hero that sustainably-minded businesses are looking for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia O'Loughlin is Group Marketing Manager for Parkside Flexibles, an innovative packaging solutions provider specializing in compostable, recyclable, paper-based and innovative plastic flexible packaging solutions for the food, personal and household care and tobacco sectors. Established for over 70 years, the company is a global supplier with manufacturing sites in both the UK & Asia and is headquartered in Normanton, West Yorkshire. Learn more at www.parksideflex.com. 

¹ https://unfccc.int/news/food-loss-and-waste-account-for-8-10-of-annual-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-cost-usd-1-trillion

² https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-plastics

³ https://www.cepi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/24-4378_EPRC_2023_Singlepages.pdf