Circular economy transition and food packaging: Engaging consumers in sustainable consumption behaviours

Food packaging has become crucial in modern food systems. It enables efficient global logistics, protects the content, helps extend product shelf-life and reduce food waste, and informs consumers. While packaging offers numerous benefits, its growing production and consumption significantly contributes to environmental issues like plastic pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change that can threaten resilience of ecosystems and impact human health.

In the European Union (EU), many of these environmental issues are addressed through Circular Economy policies and measures that prioritize waste reduction, recycling, and packaging reuse over waste incineration and landfilling. Despite decades of progress in packaging waste management, the amount of packaging waste has been steadily increasing - with current measures, it is projected to rise by 19% by 2030 (European Commission, 2022; European Council, 2024). Therefore, the EU has introduced more ambitious measures to accelerate circular economy transition.

This InformPack project business brief highlights the key insights on communicating packaging sustainability to engage consumers in adopting sustainable consumption behaviours within circular economy transition. Besides providing insights on consumers’ sustainable choices and packaging waste management, the brief also provides recommendations to business decision makers, such as packaging producers, food industry and retailers, in communicating and engaging consumers in taking actions in their daily lives.