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Why food packaging needs novel technology, sustainable solutions
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Thursday, 15 October, 2026, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Vaibhav Jha
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Waste does not exist in nature. A fallen leaf on the forest floor is not a refuse but an input into another natural process. It is nutrition for the soil and the foundation for next season’s canopy. Natural systems are circular by design where the output of one process is invariably the feedstock for another. Humans, by contrast, are the only species manufacturing materials the planet cannot digest.
For decades, most of the packaging sector has operated on the linear premise of extracting fossil fuels, converting them into high-barrier films, packing consumer goods, and abandoning the empty package in a landfill. Sustainability was treated as a cosmetic exercise by many presents as a slide in a corporate social responsibility report or a defensive line item for audit season.
That posture is no longer viable. Today, sustainability has become an urgent procurement challenge and tomorrow, it will be an absolute licence to sell. As regulatory frameworks tighten and consumer scrutiny intensifies, packaging leaders must confront the reality that incremental tweaks like lightweighting, minor down-gauging, and conventional mechanical recycling have hit their practical limits of further recycling due to inherent limitation of such recycling to give quality output for a limited number of recycling cycles. The next phase requires bold design choices and a willingness to commit to novel technologies before absolute commercial certainty arrives.
Hidden mathematics of EPR mandates
Most public discussions around Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) treat recycled content targets as simple, across-the-board percentages. Under current Indian guidelines, consumer brands face a 10 per cent recycled content mandate for flexible packaging because flexible packaging relies on multi-layer composite structures, meeting a 10 per cent mandate across the total package requires roughly 30 per cent actual post-consumer recyclate (PCR) dosing inside the dedicated PET layer. By next year, when the EPR mandate increases to 20 per cent, that requirement will double to 60 per cent actual recycled content in the PET layer.
This sudden jump exposes a major vulnerability across the supply chain. Today, many commercial "PCR films" incorporate only 8 per cent to 10 per cent actual recycled material, frequently relying on mass-balance accounting credits rather than physical content. Pushing physical PCR dosing to 30 per cent, let alone 60 per cent, severely challenges converting machinery. High concentrations of conventional recyclate cause film tear-offs, reduce line yields, create cloudy haze, and compromise thermal stability. Meeting tomorrow’s mandates requires resin pure enough to run at high dosing rates without sacrificing optical clarity or line speed. The challenge becomes steeper when looking at what flexible packaging actually holds. Roughly 65 per cent of the flexible packaging market serves food-grade applications. Yet, this dominant segment remains largely unserved by truly circular solutions.
Between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of all food produced globally spoils before reaching a consumer’s plate. Much of this loss occurs because packaging fails to shield the product from oxygen, humidity, or light. Weakening barrier properties to claim "green" credentials is an environmental net negative: when food gets rotten, all the embedded water, agricultural energy, and transport emissions are wasted alongside it. Packaging must preserve shelf life, protect hygiene, and lock in freshness.
The dilemma lies in the polymer itself:
Polyethylene (rPE): While mono-PE structures are widely discussed, recycled PE relies strictly on mechanical recycling streams that yield inconsistent purity. As a result, rPE is not approved for direct food-contact flexible packaging, restricting its use to secondary overwraps, trash bags, or low-barrier industrial applications with PCR dosing capped around 25 per cent.
Polypropylene (rPP): Achieving food-grade recycled PP requires complex chemical pyrolysis and steam-cracking pathways. These processes carry a steep cost penalty (??) and depend heavily on mass-balance allocations rather than closed-loop physical recovery.
Polyester (PET): PET is the only packaging substrate with a mature, food-grade certified recycling stream across both mechanical and chemical recovery routes. Recycled PET can be fully decontaminated back to virgin purity, making it the solitary viable path for food-grade flexible circularity at a competitive cost structure.
Solving legacy flaw: From sandwich structures to all-PET
If PET is the ideal substrate, why haven't food brands adopted mono-PET flexibles at scale? The bottleneck has always been the heat-seal layer. Traditional flexible laminates resemble an unrecyclable sandwich: an outer print layer of PET, a middle barrier layer, and an inner sealing layer of polyethylene (PE). Melting these incompatible polymer chemistries together ruins the mechanical recycling stream.
To solve this:
1. Ultra Clean Crystal Clear (UCCC) rPET: A proprietary decontamination process that restores recycled PET flakes to virgin-equivalent purity. This enables films to incorporate up to 90 per cent actual physical recycled content without dropping processing yield or clouding film clarity.
2. Ultra-High Seal (EUHS) BOPET: A patented film featuring an intrinsic heat-sealable layer with a low seal-initiation temperature. This eliminates the PE sealant layer entirely, allowing converters to manufacture packaging made 100 per cent from polyester.
An all-PET structure transforms the recycling equation. Because it belongs to a single polymer family, it requires no complex delamination or sorting at its end of life. Moreover, polyester’s inherent mechanical and tensile strength enables an immediate 20 per cent reduction in film gauge. This down-gauging lowers polymer consumption at the converter stage before the package is filled, transported, or recycled.
Industrial parallels: Breaking the recycling ceiling
The packaging sector is not the first industry to hit a structural ceiling. Looking at neighbouring manufacturing sectors reveals a consistent historical blueprint:
Fashion industry: For decades, textile recycling was synonymous with downcycling—shredding discarded garments into coarse carpet underlay or cleaning rags. The sector broke through this limit by investing in textile-to-textile chemical depolymerisation, unlocked by global apparel brands signing long-term off-take commitments.
Automotive industry: Traditional vehicle dismantling relied on heavy smelting and incomplete material recovery. Car manufacturers broke their recycling ceiling through closed-loop hydrometallurgical recovery, enabled by direct joint ventures and risk-sharing capital investments.
In both cases, industry leaders did not wait for perfect infrastructure to appear out of thin air. They broke the ceiling by making a technology commitment ahead of absolute operational certainty.
Flexible packaging now faces that exact inflection point. Through Ester Loop Infinite Technologies (ELITe), the company is establishing its first commercial chemical depolymerisation facility with a 70,000-tonne annual capacity. This facility will be able to recycle wide range of polyester wastes such as multi-layer flexible packaging laminates and mixed-fibre textiles and depolymerise it back into its fundamental monomers: dimethyl terephthalate (DMT) and monoethylene glycol (MEG). This will further be polymerised to form PET chips of virgin-like quality.
Inks, metallised barriers, adhesives, and colorants are filtered out completely. The recovered monomers are repolymerised into virgin-quality resin, achieving a closed "laminate-to-laminate" loop where a used crisp packet can return as an identical, high-barrier pouch indefinitely. Global brands such as Nike and industrial partners like Taro Plast have already validated this route by executing multi-year off-take agreements.
Urban mining & cost journey to shelf
Rethinking waste fundamentally changes national supply chain resilience. For decades, manufacturing growth has meant relying on imported fossil fuels and vulnerable overseas supply lines. Circularity also enhances Manufacturing Sovereignty by mining the waste in our urban and rural areas.
By treating post-consumer flexible packaging not as municipal trash but as an above-ground urban mine, domestic manufacturers can secure high-purity polymer feedstocks within national borders, insulating production from geopolitical oil disruptions. Yet brand procurement teams often raise a practical concern: What about the cost premium?
The perception that sustainable packaging is cost-prohibitive stems from looking narrowly at the initial raw-material transaction. A sustainable resin or advanced mono-material film naturally carries an early innovation premium at the film manufacturing plant. However, as that film moves downstream—through printing, laminating, slitting, high-speed filling, logistics, warehousing, and retail shelf display—the initial cost increment gets diluted across the entire retail value chain. By the time the finished product sits on a store shelf, the price difference per consumer unit is negligible.
Consumer sentiment confirms the commercial viability of this transition. Across global markets, between 40 per cent and 85 per cent of consumers express a willingness to pay a premium for verified sustainable packaging. In India, that figure sits at 85 per cent—the highest recorded across surveyed economies.
Consumers also understand what they want:
Recyclability is the no. 1 sustainability trait: Consumers rank recyclability as the single most critical environmental factor, placing it above compostable or bio-based claims.
Producers are held accountable: Consumers view brand owners and packaging manufacturers as the parties most responsible for fixing packaging waste—far more accountable than retailers, consumers, or even municipal regulators.
Road ahead
Achieving true circularity is not an overnight switch; it is a structural progression. But clinging to multi-polymer laminates that are destined for an incinerator is a strategy with an approaching expiration date. With EPR mandates scaling to 20 per cent in the immediate horizon, brands can no longer rely on non-food packaging offsets or mass-balance accounting credits to achieve compliance.
The technological tools: All-PET mono-material laminates that down-gauge material usage by 20 per cent at the source; Ultra-clean resins capable of incorporating up to 90 per cent physical recycled content without line degradation; Commercial chemical depolymerisation facilities ready to recover used packaging at the molecular level.
Just as in the automotive and fashion sectors, progress requires commercial partnerships between packaging film manufacturers and FMCG brand owners before regulatory deadlines leave no choice. Together, the participants in the value chain and especially the brands need to bet on new technologies and be early adopters and investors in the innovation ecosystem. Packaging leaders needs to choose designing for recyclability and not consider it as an afterthought. It is therefore the time for India's F&B leaders to take the lead the turn an imposing regulatory hurdle into an enduring generational impact and a win-win business opportunity.
(The author is chief executive officer at Ester Industries Limited)
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