A new opinion piece from Dan Felton, president and CEO of the Flexible Packaging Association, makes a point that activists and certain state legislators would rather you not think too hard about: packaging policy that treats all materials the same isn't policy -- it's ideology.
In a piece for Resource Recycling, Felton correctly writes that the wave of state-level packaging mandates, EPR schemes and material bans now sweeping the country need a serious reality check. The piece is worth reading in full, and it's particularly relevant for anyone who cares about what packaging actually does — keeping food safe, preventing waste, protecting public health — rather than just how it photographs in an anti-plastic press release.
The Real-World Complexity That Activists Ignore
Flexible packaging is not a monolith. A pouch protecting shelf-stable food from oxygen and moisture is doing something fundamentally different from sterile pharmaceutical packaging — which is doing something fundamentally different from industrial transport film. These are engineering solutions tailored to specific performance requirements. Lumping them together under a single regulatory hammer demonstrates a failure to understand the sector rather than a desire to promote true sustainability.
As Felton notes, flexible packaging represents roughly 21 percent of the $213 billion U.S. packaging market and supports nearly 100,000 jobs. When policymakers write careless legislation, they aren't just tweaking a supply chain. They're disrupting a major American manufacturing sector, and they're doing so based on simplified assumptions that often don't survive scrutiny.
Material Bans Can Make Things Worse
Here's the part that rarely makes it into the activist talking points: forcing a switch from one packaging material to another doesn't guarantee a better environmental outcome. It can require heavier packaging that burns more fuel in transport. It can reduce shelf life, which accelerates food spoilage — and the environmental footprint of wasted food dwarfs most packaging impacts by any honest lifecycle measure.
These tradeoffs are not hypothetical. They are the kinds of engineering realities that packaging designers navigate every single day. Outcome-based policy frameworks — those focused on measurable environmental goals rather than mandating specific materials — allow that expertise to function. Material bans driven by activist pressure do not.
The Right Kind of Packaging Policy
Felton argues for regulatory frameworks that set performance targets and let industry innovate toward them, rather than prescribing which materials are acceptable based on political fashion. It's a reasonable, science-based position. It's also one that tends to get buried under the louder voices insisting that any plastic is bad plastic, regardless of what it protects, how it performs or what replaces it.
We'd encourage policymakers, reporters, and engaged consumers to read Felton's full piece at Resource Recycling before taking activist-driven packaging bans at face value. The material facts deserve the same scrutiny as the materials themselves.