ChemFORWARD and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition Launch the Safe + Circular Materials Collaborative
ChemFORWARD and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition launch the Safe + Circular Materials Collaborative
ChemFORWARD and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition are launching a new Collaborative to support companies in achieving their 2025 commitments to eliminate waste and single-use plastics.
The SPC is the leading voice on sustainable packaging, with a membership that represents the entire supply chain including the world’s largest retailers, manufacturers, raw material suppliers, food companies, and a wide range of other industries. The SPC envisions a world where all packaging is sourced responsibly, designed to be effective and safe throughout its life cycle, meets market criteria for performance and cost, is made entirely using renewable energy, and once used, is recycled efficiently to provide a valuable resource for subsequent generations.
“This partnership with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition will not only help support companies seeking the material building blocks that will make packaging safe for humans and the environment across the product life cycle; it will seek to identify and activate the supply chain drivers to create lasting systems change,” said ChemFORWARD Executive Director Stacy Glass.
The focus of the Collaborative will be guided by research provided by the Food Packaging Forum and prioritized by member input and is expected to include compostable and recyclable packaging, targeting the most hazardous chemicals, pathways of highest concern, and areas with the greatest potential to contribute to circularity.
To begin, the collaborative will establish priority functional areas and agree on criteria for high-impact safer alternatives, explore material-health challenges related to packaging, leveraging experts and shared insights and innovations and develop a common set of best practices and agenda to accelerate adoption of safer alternatives and systems change throughout the wider value chain.
In addition, ChemFORWARD will pilot a project to collect, assess and verify solutions for safe and circular packaging building blocks, populating a shared registry with input from members of the collaborative. ChemFORWARD will leverage its existing digital and process infrastructure and seed funding to support the collaboration.
“By broadening the availability of trusted data for food packaging materials and functional additives, ChemFORWARD and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition seek to accelerate the development of packaging that contributes to a circular economy,” said Nina Goodrich, director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and executive director of its parent organization, GreenBlue.
Much of the packaging that consumers encounter with their food contains hazardous chemicals. From takeout containers to cans of beans and boxes of cereal, food packaging carries with it substances that have been connected with human health issues such as reproductive dysfunction, impaired brain development, and cancer. From the packaging, these chemicals often migrate into food, peoples’ bodies, and eventually the environment.
Even as there is a clear need for packaging made with chemicals that are less toxic to people, less polluting of the environment, and more suitable for circularity, companies including those which have committed to working on the problem lack the information needed to optimize feedstock inputs with safer alternatives.
“Current safety assessment of food contact chemicals is ineffective at protecting human health,” Jane Munke, Anna-Maria Andersson, and Martin Scheringer wrote in Environmental Health last year. The group of scientists works on developmental biology, endocrinology, epidemiology, toxicology, and environmental and public health, wrote that “including chemical safety considerations in the development of sustainable packaging will lead to solutions that are beneficial to both human and environmental health.”
ChemFORWARD is a non-profit, value chain collaboration providing access to the trusted data which underpins the pathway to safer products. ChemFORWARD is working to be the globally trusted source of cost-effective chemical hazard data for safer alternatives so that increased use of chemical hazard profiles for proactive decision making will lead to safer products for all and enable a safe and circular economy.
For more information about the collaborative, contact Stacy Glass, ChemFORWARD executive director.
Anyone wishing to join the Collaborative must be a member of SPC. For more information about joining the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, contact Karen Hagerman, project manager for SPC Collaboratives.
