Founder of Biopak Richard Fine was named APCO’s Sustainability Champion for 2021 for his groundbreaking work addressing food packaging waste and food waste. Here he shares his wisdom and insight with PKN.
Since you founded BioPak, how has the company’s penetration of the Australian market increased, and what have been the drivers for this?
Since 2006 BioPak has increased market penetration year on year, however, in recent years there has been a significant spike in demand for bio-based and compostable alternatives to many single use plastic disposables.
Drivers include China’s ban on waste imports, together with numerous hard hitting documentaries that resonated with consumers and made them aware of the scale of destruction and pollution as a result of our inefficient use of plastics.
More recently, with the federal government’s plastic reduction and recycling targets and a growing list of single use plastic bans being rolled out across the country, demand for plastic alternatives is increasing.
Today the pressure on packaging could not be felt more: cost, weight, carbon footprint reduction demands, material type and origin scrutiny, consumer perception, renewability, recyclability requirements and much more. Nowadays, more than ever, sustainability is considered to be part of a product’s identity, as consumers are increasingly establishing new norms when it comes to sustainable behaviours.
What are barriers to the uptake of bio-based packaging in Australia?
Cost is one of the major barriers. When competing with petrochemical-based polymers, the bio-based equivalents are significantly more expensive.
In some instances, there is insufficient production capacity to meet demand.
Functional performance is another factor limiting the uptake of bio-based alternatives – while this is being addressed, in many cases with the exception of bio-based plastics such as PE and PET, it’s currently just not possible to obtain the same shelf life or product protection that is provided by petrochemical-based plastics.
When it comes to compostable packaging, a lack of harmonised legislation among the states relating to single use plastic bans, and a voluntary approach to compost certification, results in consumer confusion and the potential of non-compostable products contaminating the organic resource recovery stream. In NSW, the EPA regulation does not allow packaging as an approved input to the composting process.
Despite all the barriers, there is still progress being made and bio-based alternatives continue to replace significant volumes of petrochemical plastic products.
You have done groundbreaking work aimed at addressing food packaging waste and food waste. What are the most significant achievements?
For me, Compost Connect is the final and most critical piece of the puzzle required to realise the benefit and value of compostable packaging – when we first introduced compostable packaging the only end of life option for these products was landfill. In the foodservice industry, the packaging is only one part of the system. Changing only the packaging will not address the bigger challenge of resources ending up in landfill; collaboration is required in order to accelerate change.
Compost Connect is the culmination of years of work and we now have a platform that brings together the people and businesses within the foodservice industry who believe in a future where there is no waste – this is one of my most significant achievements
What is your hope for the Australian packaging industry’s future?
In the 21st century our planet is reaching its limits in terms of resources – a world home to over 10 billion people by the end of the century. We must take tight control of its limited resources – be they fossil fuels, minerals, land and forests. And of course we have to take better care of our atmosphere –already suffering so much from ever-rising carbon emissions. The issue across the globe is to transform what we see, misguidedly, as waste into resource.
I have no doubt that the packaging industry will adapt and evolve to cater to the ever-changing needs and concerns of consumers. My hope is that we rapidly transition to a circular model, and significantly reduce consumption of virgin petrochemical plastics in favour of recycled materials and materials derived from sources that are renewable such as biomass, sugars, sunlight and CO2.
This article was first published in the January-February 2022 print issue of PKN Packaging News, p26.
