A Global Stage for Packaging

Packaging has an image problem. The World Packaging Organisation (WPO) wants to change that and is launching the World Packaging Day, a global awareness day for the packaging industry. It will be observed for the first time on September 6. In this interview, WPO President Luciana Pellegrino explains why packaging can be part of the solution.

Packaging is still too often perceived for packaging waste. In reality, it is the silent yet essential engine of modern society ensuring quality of life, combining technology, innovation, materials engineering, modern logistics, food safety, usability and information.

The World Packaging Day is particularly important because it creates a global platform to raise public awareness of packaging’s strategic role in supplying more than eight billion people, and allowing more efficient and sustainable production and consumption chains.

In the long term, we want to elevate the conversation and reposition packaging as a positive, strategic and enabling force for people, businesses and the planet.

The story that is still not told often enough is about the environmental impact packaging saves by conserving products and avoiding loss and waste, about how efficient supply chains reduces carbon emissions, about the economic growth it allows to business and to countries by adding value to local resources, about how it enabled industrialization and how it enabled urbanization by guaranteeing safe and convenient access to goods, about how much human life has been extended in average due to access to proper nutrition and to medication. In the bottom line, how it supports to source more than 8 billion people on earth every day.

Even though packaging itself is present in people’s everyday life, it is a btob industry. Brands usually communicate with consumers, but they do that focusing on the product itself, no in the packaging.

With that, packaging’s value often goes unnoticed, while taking it for granted when it performs its functions effectively. As a result, attention is not frequently focused on the technology, research, engineering, safety, logistics and design behind every package.

This is where the World Packaging Day comes in. A collective effort to raise awareness about the role packaging plays as an enabler of our modern life in society, contributing to economic growth, social wellbeing, and environmental footprint. At the same time, we do expect that the WPD also contributes to bring together different stakeholders and to foster collaboration for the advancement of circularity within consumption – from packaging design to products efficiency to consumption to disposal to collection to sorting and to recycling.

The World Packaging Day was conceived as a decentralized, participatory and collaborative global platform rather than a single centralized event. WPO Members, Corporate Partners, companies and other stakeholders are invited to develop their own events, projects and initiatives aligned with its purpose. These may include conferences, roundtables, factory open days, B2B events, educational programs, exhibitions, design showcases, innovation laboratories, hackathons and sustainability projects.

These activities will share the World Packaging Day identity, be included in an official global calendar and be promoted through a coordinated communication campaign. This distributed model is intended to establish World Packaging Day as a recurring international platform for dialogue, awareness, responsibility, collaboration and innovation.

The WPD will have achieved its mission if it becomes a global reference point for dialogue, awareness and innovation around packaging as an essential part of the infrastructure of modern society. Success would mean that packaging is more widely recognized as a tool for progress, an effective solution for reducing food loss and waste, a pillar of economic competitiveness and global trade, and a driver of sustainability, safety, inclusion and design-led innovation. And at the same time, if there is more collaboration among stakeholders to drive sustainability in consumption and in society.