Consumers are looking for products with as small an environmental footprint as possible. The essential thing that delivers the product to the consumer is the packaging. This makes sustainable packaging a very important consideration for all businesses today. Business owners are facing the challenge to strike the perfect balance between convenience and sustainability. Read on to find out why environmentally friendly packaging is so important.
What Does The Customer Want?
General awareness of environmental concerns, as well as health and ethical issues, has been growing year on year. People’s attitudes towards these issues are affecting their purchasing decisions. Plastic waste is a major annoyance for many customers. However, products do need to be packaged to ensure they reach the customer in perfect condition. Some customers are only willing to buy from companies that share their environmental values. Going green makes business sense not only to make your business more sustainable but also to align with your customers’ needs.
What Are The Options
Sustainability is the focus of any forward-thinking business. Ensuring that being green is reflected in your core values is an integral part of future-proofing your business. Considering all aspects of your business is the best way to begin; you can then focus on the areas which need to become more environmentally friendly. One of the simplest places to start, with a big impact, is the packaging.
There are a few key areas to concentrate on when reviewing your packaging. One is to reduce the plastic, and other carbon-heavy packaging, used. Another is to increase the use of recycled materials in your packaging. You can also switch to more sustainable packaging alternatives. One great example of this is this sustainable polythene from Polythene UK.
See A Boost To Your Image and Sales
When you are making important changes to your business to allow it to become more sustainable it is worth telling your customers about it. Customers who already use your Company will be happy to hear they are supporting a green business. Being able to demonstrate you are an ethical business will be a huge boost to your company’s reputation. Similarly, you may attract new customers whose environmental values match your business practices.
Environmental Benefits
Whatever your initial reason to go green the benefits to the environment are undeniable. This is particularly true when it comes to packaging. By changing your packaging to be more sustainable, biodegradable or fully recyclable you are physically taking it out of the chain to landfill. With unsustainable materials being phased out around the world, and large corporations announcing packaging updates all the time, now is the time to make changes in your own business.
Green Grants Are Available
Once your packaging is as sustainable as possible it is worth seeing how going green can continue. The government offers various green grants and other funding to businesses that meet requirements. This is part of the government’s commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. There are different funds available for different projects and businesses and they are updated regularly. It is worth checking what funding is available as it can make going green more attractive for businesses.
In Conclusion
To improve the sustainability of your packaging simply: increasing the use of recycled materials substantially reduces the carbon footprint and the resource consumption to make the product. Packaging may be only a small part of your business but if we all make environmentally beneficial changes, however small they might be, collectively we can have a huge positive impact on the environment.