A Year of Sustainability Innovation and Insights

EcoEnclose has invested in many innovation projects this year to serve our vision of circularity.

We launched Sway seaweed-based solutions, developed a certified RCS100 poly mailer, expanded our poly take-back program, and more.   For us, product development is a nonlinear path filled with collaboration, intense planning, false starts, unexpected roadblocks, and exciting wins.

Today, I’m sharing my reflections from the past year of innovation, iteration, and the (incredibly humbling) process of learning how challenging progress can be.  

As many brands start thinking about their vision for 2025, I hope these reflections help you consider how to best invest in sustainable innovation in the year ahead.

Reflections and lessons from the past year 

I’m thankful for the optimists. Whenever I talk to someone developing an innovative technology, I am buoyed by their sense of possibility.   These days, it is easy for me to get caught up in negativity and paralysis. Connecting with sustainability-minded innovators is a much-needed reminder to stop spiraling and take action towards our sustainable packaging north star.

If a promising innovation was perfect, it would already be the norm. I’ve stopped asking emerging packaging technologies to match the performance and cost of the mainstream solutions they are replacing.

The world has been manufacturing plastic and aluminum for decades, and paper and glass for centuries. Demanding that restorative alternatives immediately fit perfectly into infrastructure designed for these longstanding solutions sets advancements up for failure.

So we introduce innovations recognizing their imperfections, pilot them with the right brands, and get rapid feedback that helps us iterate and continuously improve.

I’m more grateful to our EcoAlly community than ever. Innovations only gain market adoption with the engagement of early adopters willing to take the leap and partner with us to make a solution work successfully.  

serves thousands of brands. A small but mighty group of EcoAllies have rooted their brand DNA in sustainability and ecological innovation. They have become critical partners in our packaging innovation journey. They are often willing to pay more, are comfortable with unknowns, and their customers are raving fans who want to engage with and give feedback on innovations.

We also serve many brands that haven’t built their identity on sustainability. For them, cost constraints, aesthetic requirements, or operational needs can make it challenging to adopt untested packaging technology. And that is okay! These brands often take the plunge after early adopters have paved the way.   I’ve come to appreciate the diversity in our brand community and that every company we work with can play a valuable role in the sustainability innovation journey.

Complex innovation decisions need simple frameworks. Just because something is innovative doesn’t mean it’s better.  

We’ve developed a framework to assess innovations. 

(1) Evaluate the environmental impact of each stage in the innovation’s lifecycle: raw input production and extraction - manufacturing and converting raw inputs into usable materials - storing and transporting raw inputs and finished packaging - end of life.

(2) Ensure the evaluation covers all relevant impact areas: greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, biodiversity ramifications, land use conversion and production efficiency, deforestation risk, freshwater consumption, phosphorus and nitrogen runoff, and more.

(3) Determine how functional the material is or can be in the future. Will it do the job required?   This approach has led us to greenlight certain materials (film made from sustainably produced seaweed, film made from regeneratively grown sugarcane, paper derived from wheat straw) and reject others (film made from trees, film made from corn, paper made from bamboo).

However, we also recognize that emerging technologies will be ecologically imperfect as they scale. In the early stages, wheat straw must be blended with virgin wood chips to produce usable paper. Seaweed-derived packaging may have to include fossil-fuel-derived inputs to be viable. Many new materials may be technically recyclable but will have to be composted or landfilled early on because recycling is only feasible after the material is ubiquitous enough for recyclers to invest in the infrastructure for collection and sorting.

It has taken me some time to get comfortable with this messy middle, but I’ve come to realize that if I don’t embrace the fact that the solutions our future needs will almost definitely be environmentally imperfect to start with, we’ll never make any progress.

Supply chains for new technology are limited; when one player falls, it is a significant setback. EcoEnclose was proud to have launched curbside recyclable paper pouches in the US. Unfortunately, a key player in the supply chain for this solution shut down earlier this year, bringing production to a halt until we rebuild that solution in the supply chain.

We saw a similar situation in the journey towards next-generation paper solutions when Columbia Pulp, North America’s first pulp mill dedicated entirely to wheat straw, was shuttered four years after launching operations. This has strained efforts to offer wheat straw packaging. 

These needed solutions will not be stalled forever, but we must accept that finding new players or waiting as these operations rebuild can add years to the innovation process.

Transparency is critical but is also risky for those inventing novel materials. The brands and consumers most interested in adopting eco-innovations also want to know the nuanced details.  

At the same time, the companies at the forefront of inventing these materials have invested heavily in R&D to develop their unique solutions and need to protect their IP. Securing patents can help, but keeping some information private is also essential.  

Balancing transparency while mitigating risks to the companies who are investing and taking risks on these groundbreaking materials is tricky and requires partnership and empathy across all parties.

Sometimes a new solution just doesn’t work (yet). For example, we launched paper pallet wrap in 2023, hoping to give plastic-free focused brands a curbside recyclable alternative to pallet wrap. But our paper pallet wrap proved not yet to be functional enough. So, after receiving extensive brand feedback and input from our internal warehouse team, we made the difficult decision to sunset this offering.   

Could curbside recyclable pallet wrap be a thing of the future? We hope so!  

But for now, we recognize that making this difficult decision is critical to a strong innovation process.

CEO and Chief Sustainability Officer

EcoEnclose

saloni@ecoenclose.com