Paper, Plastics and Proof

Published: January 26, 2026, By Trevor

By Cooper Henderson, Director of Segment Strategy, Industrial Physics

Across Europe and North America, packaging professionals face a fundamental shift. New producer responsibility regulations now attach real financial consequences to the continued use of single-use plastics. Retailers are tightening acceptance criteria, and consumers are actively rejecting unnecessary polymer packaging. In this environment, sustainability is no longer a ‘nice to have’ — it has become critical to commercial success.

This pressure is helping to drive dynamic growth in the global paper and pulp market. The sector is valued at approximately $360 billion and is forecast to grow to over $391 billion by 2032 according to industry analysts.¹ That growth is not driven by magazines or newspapers, it is driven by the packaging sector, which is seeing increasing pressure to replace plastic with fiber wherever technically viable.

More Than a Simple Substrate Substitution

The direction for the industry is clear: move away from petroleum-based materials, use more recycled fiber and reduce the overall material footprint of packaging. But this shift is not simply a substrate substitution exercise. Replacing plastic is far more complex in reality than many assume.

Plastic offers exceptional mechanical strength, barrier behavior, seal integrity, moisture management and distribution resilience. The difficult challenge for manufacturers is ensuring they can achieve the same high levels of performance with fiber-based materials.

What’s more, paper is not one material. It is a wide family of fiber systems with different formation chemistry, fiber morphology, coatings, fillers and treatments. When recycled fiber is added, which is critical for emissions reduction, variation increases further. Contaminants, retained inks, adhesive residues and degraded fiber length all shift the optical and mechanical behavior of the resulting sheet.

Paper can absolutely replace plastics in many applications, but the associated performance risk is increasing. More recycled fibers are good for circularity, but they make the material less predictable. The only rational way to manage this is to test more, and to test better.

Paper manufacturers need data that captures the material’s optical, mechanical and surface properties consistently. Image courtesy of Industrial Physics

The Importance of Credible Science

Historically, testing in paper packaging has often been intermittent, manual and weighted toward basic property checks. That is no longer sufficient. As operations become more innovation-led, and as the cost of raw material unpredictability rises, manufacturers cannot afford to discover problems at the end of the line. They need early warning. They need data that captures optical, mechanical and surface properties consistently. And they need that data captured fast enough to intervene before variation becomes waste.

Industrial Physics’ research reflects this industry shift. Only 17% of paper packaging professionals believe their company is genuinely innovative today, yet 51% plan to take a more innovative approach within three years, and 62% are considering external partnerships to accelerate that progress. At the same time, 63% say they need a bigger team to meet manufacturing demand, but a significant proportion have reduced headcount in the last five years.

The emerging pattern is clear — the industry is trying to do more complex work with leaner teams, which makes trusted testing capability even more strategically important.

Navigating these shifts requires clearer evidence about how new fiber systems behave. As blends, coatings and recycled content evolve, manufacturers need clarity on which properties matter most, how those properties should be measured, and what constitutes data that can withstand audit, regulatory review and customer scrutiny.

Five years ago, the dominant question was simply, “how do we reduce plastic?” Today it is, “how do we know this new material will perform at scale?” When changes in formation, brightness, opacity, porosity or surface chemistry occur, performance in real distribution environments can shift in ways that are difficult to predict. These challenges cannot be solved by ambition alone. They require measurement, proven methodology and consistent, standards-aligned testing to generate evidence that supports safe, credible innovation.

Industrial Physics operates one of the world’s few ISO 4094 Level 3 authorized laboratories - a peer-reviewed facility that enables production of reference papers used to calibrate instruments globally. This traceability ensures measurements reflect true values, aligned to recognized TAPPI and ISO standards, so teams can operate with greater confidence, reduce waste and maintain specification even under pressure. The goal with this is not to replace human expertise, but to amplify it, using technology to keep quality constant even as personnel, substrates and processes evolve.

The Next Chapter

With this backdrop in mind, one conclusion is clear: the packaging industry cannot deliver credible sustainability without credible science. The transition from plastic to paper is the right direction, but the only way to make that transition commercially safe and operationally resilient is through more rigorous testing and measurement. The next chapter of sustainable packaging therefore, will not be defined by who changes materials first, but by who can prove performance with evidence.

Reference

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/pulp-and-paper-market-103447

About the Author


Cooper Henderson is Strategy Director for Flexible Packaging at Industrial Physics, helping manufacturers improve packaging safety, reliability, and sustainability through market insight and technology evaluation across paper, film, and flexible materials. To learn more about how Industrial Physics is helping paper and packaging innovators test, validate and scale the next generation of fiber-based materials with confidence, visit: www.industrialphysics.com