”The future is genuinely exciting”
A decisive decade is reshaping the packaging industry. Maria Edqvist Schultz, Head of Sustainability at Emballator, sees the changes as a catalyst for innovation.
For Maria Edqvist Schultz, Emballator’s Head of Sustainability and a member of CEN’s Design for Recycling working group, the industry is entering a decisive decade one shaped as much by regulation and systems thinking as by materials science.
Maria has extensive experience at the intersection of legislation, customer expectations, and technical constraints. “When we established our climate roadmap three years ago, aiming to halve our carbon footprint per revenue by 2030, it was considered ambitious,” she says. “Today, legislation has caught up. In many ways, that’s reassuring.”
Collective decisions matter
Emballator was among the first packaging suppliers to set a formal climate strategy, now aligned with the trajectory of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). Much of what Emballator committed to, as increasing recycled content, phasing out problematic materials, reducing excess weight, is now becoming regulatory baseline.
But ambition alone is not enough. “We cannot deliver on our goals without the help of the rest of the industry,” Maria notes. Transport emissions illustrate the point: Emballator can offer HVO100 transport with roughly 85% lower climate impact, yet the small cost premium, can be difficult to justify when packaging represents only a small share of a product’s total footprint. Collective decisions matter.
What counts as “Recyclable”?
By 2030, every piece of packaging placed on the European market must be recyclable. The difficulty is that the criteria for recyclability are still being negotiated.
As part of the European standardisation process, Maria works with industry, recyclers and brand owners to define material-specific criteria. The questions range from how a bottle can be correctly detected in sorting streams to how additives affect the quality of the recyclate.
“Until the standards are approved, everyone is designing against a moving target,” she explains. “But mono-material solutions give us a head start. If a bottle or tube is made from a single, sortable material, we can be confident it will work in future recycling systems.”
Designing for a new reality: smaller packs, smarter formats, refill on the shelf
PPWR also introduces challenges beyond recyclability. Packaging can no longer be larger than necessary, and larger supermarkets should strive to dedicate around 10% of shelf space to refill systems. This implies an entirely new category of packaging of durable, attractive containers that consumers are willing to bring back, refill and eventually recycle.
“Designing for sustainability is not simply a matter of picking a better material,” Maria says. “It’s a conceptual shift. It forces us to rethink what packaging is for, how it is carried, used, refilled, sorted and reused.”
Roadmap 2030
Emballator’s climate work centres on five focus areas, where materials and transport remain critical levers. Recycled content in plastics continues to increase across the portfolio. Aluminium tubes already contain high levels of recycled material, largely because the performance gap between recycled and virgin aluminium is small and customers have been willing to adopt it. Although not everything progresses as planned.
“Some bio-based energy alternatives that we really believed in have proven commercially unviable” says Maria “but we still remain on track to halve our climate footprint by 2030.”
“More exciting than daunting”
Despite the regulatory pressure, Maria sees opportunity. Clearer rules can accelerate innovation, improve material flows, and strengthen the market for recycled plastics and metals. And for brands willing to move early, the transition offers genuine competitive upside.
“There’s a sense that the industry is finally moving in the same direction,” she says. “It’s challenging, but genuinely exciting, because it allows us to design packaging solutions together with our clients that truly address future needs. We’re finding the way as we go, and close collaboration is what creates real competitive advantages. There’s so much potential.”
