The food industry has faced increasing pressure in recent years to stop creating so much waste with its packaging materials. Now, several brands are listening, and the demand for sustainable, recyclable packaging is starting to grow, which has resulted in a new type of candy wrapper from Austrian packaging manufacturer Constantia Flexibles, Sustainable Packaging News reported.
Constantia's new product, named EcoTwistPaper, is a paper twist-wrap for confectionaries — the type of packaging you might find holding a Tootsie Roll or a Werther's Original, for example. The crucial difference between those twist-wraps and Constantia's is that EcoTwistPaper has no wax or plastic coating, making it entirely recyclable.
"Driven by our dedication to sustainability and addressing the demands of the confectionary industry, we developed EcoTwistPaper," executive vice president consumer commercial Marc Rademacher told Sustainable Packaging News. "This innovation represents a significant advancement within the confectionery packaging sector."
Though candy companies such as Mars have made past efforts to clean up some of the plastic wrappers they release into the world — particularly around Halloween, during which time Americans buy roughly 600 million pounds of candy every year — those efforts have relied on individual consumers seeking out ways to recycle their candy wrappers and have amounted to a drop in the bucket, anti-pollution advocates say.
"The onus cannot be on the customer to fix the massive plastic waste problem," Leah Karrer, a Washington, D.C.-based conservationist, told Phys.org. "The solution is system change."
In order to truly address the problem of candy packaging that ends up filling landfills, these companies need to move beyond single-use plastics and non-recyclable packaging, as Constantia has done with its EcoTwistPaper.
Other similar recent advancements in the food industry have included Heinz Ketchup's fully recyclable bottle cap, Kellogg's expanding its portfolio of eco-friendly boxes, and Aldi's recyclable butter packaging.
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