Ian Schofield has enjoyed a busy consultancy life since taking semi-retirement in 2019. He reflects on the impact of sustainability on the packaging sector and how those involved in producing packaging have become more important than ever before.

Things have really got interesting for Ian Schofield, since he took semi-retirement in 2019 from his position as Own Label manager at Iceland Foods in 2019.

He had been at the retailer for around six years on his second stint at the business. Very probably, he was looking forward to winding down a little after a career that began in 1978 as a packaging technologist, before taking him into sales and marketing roles in repro, print supply and branding solutions, with FMCG packaging roles in the gaps between.

But it has not worked out like that. In fact, Mr Schofield has a dizzying range of activities on the go, as companies have brought him in to work on their packaging projects. Without fail, what links all this professional consultancy is that key issue for the whole packaging sector: sustainability.

The post-Iceland rush began with a call from Lancashire firm Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses, which wanted recyclable packaging for every one of its 150 SKUs. ‘It was perfect for me to get my teeth into. That kept me in touch with the flexo guys, to talk about getting them onto mono materials.’ Mr Schofield reflects. ‘Cheese is one of the worst packaging materials for sustainability because of all the mixed laminations, and cheese is especially difficult because all the different types of cheese have different breathing rates and shelf lives, which means different packaging and papers with waxes on them.

‘That was the biggest challenge, moving all the cheeses onto mono films or papers that did not have wax. The next challenge was getting them recyclable in today’s waste infrastructure. Working with Butlers, we got all these cheeses onto recyclable materials within three years. It started with Butlers cheeses, but it has rippled through.’

The phone was busy through all this though. Another call came from the design agency Elmwood (now called Born Ugly), which wanted Mr Schofield to help its designers and customers to think sustainability in their packaging design briefs.

The Irish retailer Musgrave (SuperValu, Centra stores) enlisted Mr Schofield’s expertise to help it tackle the demands of EU sustainability legislation. Mr Schofield relates, ‘They have been paying the EPR taxes in Ireland for two years already. I had to set that up from scratch. We had to go right back to basics: get the weight and the datasheets for every packaging material, which were really poor to start with; where is the material coming from, which supplier, which country, and what’s the weight. That experience from Ireland will be useful for the UK now. Reducing weight is crucial for everyone in the industry.

‘I have also been doing a lot of redesign for them, and some blue sky thinking, bringing in things like seaweed-based and crustacean-based packaging. All of this is coming.’

The final piece to Mr Schofield’s post-Iceland jigsaw has been the US speciality chemicals and performance materials firm Cabot, which is doing a lot of work on water-based inkjet pigment dispersion.

‘For the last two years I have been going out to end users globally, talking about water-based digital print and where it’s going,’ he says. ‘In this role, I’m educating the end users and doing lots of print runs for them with water-based digital printing. This is coming; the presses are rolling out. There will be lots of decisions made this year on new presses and they will not be doing it without looking at one of these water-based presses.’

Well-connected

Keeping so busy has enabled Mr Schofield to stay abreast of developments in the packaging sector, and he also reflects on how things have changed in the industry, even in the last few years. One example of this is his enthusiasm for the development of ‘connected packaging’.

He says, ‘By 2027, the barcode will be replaced by the GS1 QR code. Every retailer has to change their tills. I’m doing a lot of projects with connected packaging. Retailers can drive a message to the QR code so that when scanned on a phone it will show what the ingredients are, offers that might be available, lots of different information. Sectors such as pharmaceuticals will welcome being able to track every pack. It’s revolutionary. It’s totally interactive and it’s coming fast. By 2027, pack changes will constantly happen.’

These kinds of factors will drive the growth of digital printing technologies in packaging for sure, although Mr Schofield is clear that there is plenty of life still left in analogue processes such as flexo. He refers to a new system that EFI showed at drupa 2024, which prints individual corrugated boxes, in individual sizes and with individual content. ‘That’s a revolutionary thing for corrugated, and this revolution is taking place at a rapid rate of knots. The end users are working out how they can use this technology to their advantage. It’s not about personalisation anymore. That’s tiny compared to what you can do with a QR code.’

It is also striking, says Mr Schofield, how important packaging has become alongside the sustainability requirements of today’s market, and what this means for those who are professionals in this field. In short, he questions whether there are enough qualified people around to cope with the explosion in demand for packaging experts.

‘Packaging used to be very much an afterthought, and the packaging people were tucked away in the corner of an office. But every end user now has a sustainability team, and packaging has now become critical to the product launch. Packaging will become the most important thing and there are not enough packaging technologists around for this growth. This is really the best time ever to be in packaging – what a time. The market is expanding like crazy, and sustainability is never going to stop. People in packaging are now on a great upward trend but there aren’t enough of us.’

An interesting thought in that passage is that ‘sustainability is never going to stop’. FlexoTech puts that back to Mr Schofield, in the context of the new Trump presidency in the US, and the expected rolling back of many environmental commitments and initiatives that will result from that presidency.

There will be an effect in the US, he says, but there are 19 states that already have EPR. Trump’s anti-green perspective will inevitably slow things down, but it will not stop sustainability entirely. In the end, it will mean that the US is not a leader in the field, he says. Other countries and regions will have the technology and will lead the way.

Moving back to less political spheres, Mr Schofield has words of encouragement for flexo printers and converters when he says that the incredible advances in flexo technology and processes over recent years mean ‘there’s nothing that worries me printing with flexo now’.

He goes on, ‘The industry has adapted very well on what’s needed with materials and sustainability. It’s about making sure that all the materials are fit for purpose for all the legislation that’s coming and that you are saving your customer money. Printers need to constantly update their customer and supplier base. The education with the legislation coming is the printer’s job because otherwise they will be led by design agencies. Educate your customer base and it always pays off.’