Every water bottle, yoghurt pot and crisp packet arriving at the world’s recycling facilities is the product of countless decisions made by a complex network of stakeholders.
After gathering billions of datapoints on packaging waste in the world’s recovery facilities (and launching the world’s first waste intelligence platform for brands), we wanted to understand the people and decisions behind the products.
To learn more, we listened to the people driving packaging change from within: leaders navigating the tension between technical constraints, commercial objectives, and growing environmental scrutiny.
Those interviews led to The Packaging Mindset: a cross-section of the circularity challenges that the world’s leading packaging professionals are facing, in their own words.
Discover what's driving circular change
Over five months, we conducted in-depth interviews with 20 professionals shaping the future of packaging and sustainability. Their organisations span the food, beverage, beauty, luxury, consulting, and policy sectors, representing a combined revenue of $268 billion. Over half of them lead sustainability, packaging, or R&D functions.
The Packaging Mindset isn’t just about the products themselves — it’s about the people working every day to balance internal priorities with external pressures, and short-term business needs with long-term environmental responsibility.
Key insights from the report reveal a packaging sector that is taking concrete steps towards circularity:
- 98% of participants cited EPR and regulatory shifts as critical forces shaping their packaging strategy.
- 90% had visited a materials recovery facility (MRF), a sign of commitment to understanding the system beyond the design brief.
That progress is being made in the face of six distinct challenges that surfaced in almost every interview, and across a literature review of over 50 academic papers.
We dedicated a section to each challenge in the full report, including direct quotes and in-depth analysis.
Balance your packaging priorities with The Deepnest Compass
The world of sustainable packaging is constantly evolving, and we didn’t set out to make final conclusions about its future. Instead, we built a tool to help shape that future.
The Deepnest Compass surfaces the questions and tensions that feature throughout our report, distilling complex and conflicting priorities into a series of questions to guide end-of-life decision-making. It’s designed to spark constructive discussions between packaging teams and the wider business, and to help ensure that packaging’s life beyond the bin is top of mind.
We hope you find the insights from our participants as illuminating as we did. If you have your own perspectives on packaging that you would like to share, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
