RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — With its ambitious sustainability goals, PepsiCo, Purchase, NY, has been on the leading edge of solving the sustainable packaging problem when it comes to flexible packaging for snack food products like potato chips and pretzels. 

As a part of its Pep+ goals for positive change for people and the planet, PepsiCo set the ambitious goal of designing 100% of its packaging to be recyclable, compostable and biodegradable by 2025. The company reports in its 2023 ESG report that it is on track to meet 98% of that goal by 2025 with 100% of it being met by 2030. 

Rob Cotton, R&D director of foods packaging for PepsiCo, spoke on the challenges and latest developments in the company’s quest for sustainable flexible packaging at BEMA Convention 2024, held June 28-July 2 in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Cotton was more than willing to share the company’s advances and even supplier names because PepsiCo doesn’t see this project as one of competitive advantage. 

“Sustainability is the right thing for the planet, and PepsiCo isn’t trying to create a competitive advantage in the space,” he said. “We want to share this with everyone and that’s why we’re advocating for it. We’re willing to show you how to get involved and who to partner with. Partnerships around sustainability are critical to drive success.” 

Metallized polypropylene bags have been the standard for flexible packaging, but while these thin films have been very efficient from a packaging perspective, they often end up in landfills due to lack of infrastructure for their recyclability. 

There are several challenges standing in the way of the recyclability of flexible challenge. 

Printing on multi-layered plastics must be done with eco-friendly ink as it cannot undergo mechanical recycling. 

“There are solutions coming, but they’re a long way off in our municipal recovery facilities,” Cotton explained. 

Material recovery facilities (MRFs), which were designed to sort and process corrugated material and paper board, are not designed to handle plastics. Cotton estimated that it would cost a $1 million investment per facility for these facilities to be able to process flexible packaging. With about 900 facilities in the United States, he marked that as not a likely solution. 

The other challenge is the consumers themselves. Consumer education is lacking and the collection opportunities for flexible packaging do not exist, all the way down to the need for closed bins to prevent the light packaging material from blowing away on a windy day. 

“Snacks are often eaten on the go, at parks or beaches,” Cotton said. “What kind of trash infrastructure do we have in America? The truth is we don’t have a good collection system associated with these kinds of materials.” 

Instead of placing the burden of sorting and processing on consumers or MRFs, Cotton’s attention turned to municipal solid waste facilities. Instead of consumers sorting their trash, all garbage would go to the municipal solid waste facility to be sorted. 

“There’s investment in that because a lot of valuable material is going to landfill,” he said.  

Beyond these challenges, Cotton said his team has been at work developing biodegradable flexible packaging that has multiple end of life scenarios, so the burden is off the consumer. A new polymer —polyhydroxyalkaanoates (PHA) —shows promise as a film that can mimic polypropylene. PepsiCo has worked with a range of suppliers to develop a supply chain to create these materials from the polymer to film and then convert the film to be able to run on PepsiCo’s packaging equipment at the same rate as conventional films. 

“We’ve done that successfully,” Cotton said. “It’s not perfected yet, but we’re advancing it and making great breakthroughs in a short amount of time.”

The film hasn’t been certified as biodegradable yet, as certification takes a full year, but so far tests look promising that the film will biodegrade both at home and industrial levels and in a variety of environments, including the landfill or the ocean. 

With the size of plastic production and pollution today and its rate of growth, Cotton urged that the industry needs a solution to its plastic pollution now, not in 10 years when investments in recycling infrastructure will be fulfilled. 

“We have to start on this journey with biodegradable films to start changing our direction and trajectory,” Cotton said.