Towards sustainability: The Impact of Environmental Sustainability of Consumer Goods in the Italian Packaging Sector

Abstract

Sustainable development is the path of the present and the economic and productive future. The pandemic has transformed the purchasing habits of goods, especially food products, its packaging and consequently the packaging sector as a whole is directly involved. Together with this remarkable transformation, sustainability represents another challenge of equal impact. Two surveys carried out by Nomisma Observatory in 2019 and 2020 targeting 1,000 and 1,008 consumers respectively on consumer packaged goods together with some direct qualitative interviews with packaging companies helped understand how consumer sensitization to issues of sustainability can change the packaging products, the materials used and the production methods and technologies. Manufacturing and packaging companies are facing a difficult challenge to better communicate the issue of sustainability through their products and the challenge of their clients in finding adequate margins to accelerate change in a market of consumers who are in part sensitive to sustainable development but not so willing to change their consumer spending behaviour. This study examines the possible obstacles in the value chain starting from the companies that produce packaging machinery, which must be able to process new materials, up to the production companies which in turn use such machinery for packaging their product to be offered to the final consumer. It is a team game that must involve government, industry, retailers and consumers.  Enabling technologies, properly used, may provide a solution to this difficult balance in the future.