Huhtamaki India highlights packaging industry climate impacts and mitigation routes

Packaging as a concept, with its functionality of protecting the product it holds, is a critical component of climate change mitigation.

Rahul Nene, Huhtamaki’s senior manager for sustainability in Thane, India, tells Packaging Insights that packaging helps avoid food waste and thus mitigates carbon emissions. 

“It is said that one-third of the food produced in the world gets wasted, and thus along with it, are wasted the significant GHG emissions associated with food production,” says Nene. 

“Similarly, an optimized packaging helps minimize the transportation volumes, thus ensuring reduction of emissions associated with logistics.”

Nene continues that packaging that delivers these functionalities while minimizing raw material usage is critical to reducing products’ climate footprint. 

“Hence, the choice of packaging optimized for functionality, raw material consumption, recyclability and affordability delivers significant climate benefits.”

Food packaging can mitigate climate change by keeping food fresh for longer and reducing waste. Impact assessment pilot

Most businesses impact nature through raw material sourcing, manufacturing processes or during a product’s use phase, and, conversely, depend on the natural resources. 

These interactions often degrade nature, affecting land use, water bodies or leading to the overexploitation of natural resources. Huhtamaki stresses that for a long time, these impacts received little attention, but the situation has now changed. 

An example is the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) in Colombia, which ended November 2 and focused on securing finance to meet the agreed-upon biodiversity targets in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. 

The business risks posed by nature are highlighted in many recent reports. The World Economic Forum stated that about half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its annual Global Risks Report underscores the increasing nature-related risks among top global risks. 

Huhtamaki says that these findings leave “no room for doubt” and says that “nature is not only crucial for our well-being but also represents a critical business risk that all companies need to understand and address.”

The company has now started piloting the assessment of its impacts and dependencies on nature to identify possible business risks and opportunities. With the above intent in mind, the ten Huhtamaki factories in India underwent a biodiversity-based risk assessment in 2024. The assessments adopted a holistic approach, considering impacts on water, marine life and terrestrial flora and fauna. 

The facilities also considered the presence of endemic and endangered species around the factories. As a second step, further mapping will be conducted for each of the ten sites to identify how interactions with elements of biodiversity can create opportunities for business operations.

From these assessments, Huhtamaki identified three focus sites where efforts need to be concentrated to mitigate potential biodiversity impacts. Along with opportunity mapping, a site-specific biodiversity risk mitigation plan will be created for these sites. 

The Indian sites have already undergone water scarcity risk assessments, and similar focus sites have also been identified under those assessments.

Huhtamaki says the studies help the company pinpoint the exact priority nodes of its factory operations where it needs to implement control measures to avoid any potential impact on water availability, biodiversity and ecological balance around its factories. Next year, Huhtamaki aims to finalize these mitigation plans and initiate the implementation of the measures.

Less and alternative materials Huhtamaki India identifies packaging companies committing to material reductions and innovations.

Regarding packaging companies’ responses to climate change, Nene says that solutions depend on the packaging application and that Huhtamaki sees a shift toward sustainable solutions. 

“The decision on raw material sourcing or manufacturing process for us is data-based and taken in partnership with our customers,” he says.

“That said, we see our customers working in partnership with us to develop newer solutions, either with reduced material consumption or to explore alternative materials that can offer a lower carbon footprint.” 

Huhtamaki aims to provide 100% recyclable solutions for the flexible packaging market and has invested in modern manufacturing processes that can help deliver the same to its customers. 

“Inclusion of recycled content, in place of virgin material, is another lever that helps reduce the GHG footprint of our products. Thus, making truly circular packaging solutions and moving away from linear models of packaging is the major change we see,” says Nene.

“Hand in hand with the raw material and manufacturing processes, we are also working continuously to improve our energy efficiency and also transition to renewable energy at our manufacturing units. All these efforts together help us reduce our climate footprint and that of our customers.”

“While the focus has traditionally been on carbon footprint, we’re now taking a more holistic approach by considering nature-related risks and opportunities. This includes understanding our impact on biodiversity, water resources and local ecosystems throughout our value chain,” says Nene.