Ahead of the event, organisers Green Blue dubbed 2026 "the year of the relationship", and framed the conference with "realistic optimism”. Despite the genuine progress being made by the packaging sector, though, there are some critical gaps that need to be filled for a true paradigm shift to take place.
CPG brands are going to have to make defensible decisions about design, procurement and branding over the next two to three years, and SPC Impact revealed some of the hurdles that they’ll face.
Here’s what I learned – and spoke about – in Nashville.
The standout shift versus a year ago is how matter-of-fact extended producer responsibility has become.
Circular Action Alliance is now operating in Oregon, Colorado, and California. Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington are close behind, and more than 3,000 companies are registered. That represents a real milestone for EPR viability: thousands of producers have successfully registered, reported and paid.
While celebrating high participation rates, however, most panels acknowledged a more fundamental challenge that has yet to be solved: the data needed to support credible circularity strategies like EPR is patchy, inconsistent, and frequently held in places it can’t be used.
This was the core theme of "The Crucial Need for Packaging Data Consistency" – my panel discussion with fellow packaging circularity innovators. Together, we broke down the critical data challenges that CPG sustainability leads still need to overcome:
Brands regularly make packaging decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without resolving those foundational questions. In the absence of large-scale data on packaging recovery rates, many are forced to rely on proxies or assumptions.
As I explained, however, the issue is not a data shortage: at Greyparrot, our fleet of Analyzer units detect 1.5 billion objects per day at recovery facilities around the world. Instead, there is an interpretation gap. Data is available, but it’s not always being translated into actionable insights on packaging circularity.
The lack of a data framework was a common theme across the entire SPC agenda.
Aura's Gillian Garside-Wight made the same point from the consumer-insights angle: 80% of consumers want clearer recycling guidance, and yet most brands aren’t able to outline the format, construction, sealing, density, additives, coatings, barriers, and recycled content of their full portfolio in a structured way.
In Gillian’s words: "We wouldn't make financial decisions on a business without a cost sheet. Let's not do it on packaging."
Olga Kachook's 2026 trend report echoed that sentiment. One trend, titled "shared data helping create recyclability and clarity" was effectively the polypropylene (PP) cup success story. This year, PP cold beverage cups achieved the Widely Recyclable label after years of WM, the Recycling Partnership, NextGen Consortium, and brands pooling enough operational data to prove recoverability in real waste systems.
Six years of foundational work for a single label change makes a clear point: upgrades like this don't happen without coordinated data, and data infrastructure needs to scale far faster to repeat this success for other packaging formats like moulded fiber and coated paper.
A panel on PCR further made the case for unified data on packaging waste. Kate Bailey from APR was blunt: 25% of U.S. PET recycling capacity has come offline in the last 18 months because brands are sourcing PCR from overseas. Decisions like these are made on cost data alone, without visibility into the long-term risks to resource resiliency and rPET supply.
For sustainability leaders at CPG companies, the full agenda of panels distilled to three key takeaways:
The most striking thing about Nashville wasn't the optimism, or even the daunting data gaps that still need to be filled.
Instead, it was the genuinely encouraging stories: the cup upgrade, the Oregon launch, Senator Heidi Campbell's Tennessee Waste to Jobs Act, KIND's recyclable wrapper, IKEA's flat-pack discipline. Each was powered by people quietly putting in years of effort to build the underlying data and relationships.
Circularity is a measurement problem before it is a materials problem. The next two to three years will determine whether we build the shared evidence base needed to move beyond individual success stories to system-wide change.
At Deepnest, we’re seeing encouraging signs that the sector’s leaders are ready for that systemic shift. Scalable, actionable data on post-consumption packaging is already here – and with events like SPC Impact defining the urgent need for visibility, producers are more motivated than ever to understand their products’ end-of-life journey.