The Future of Packaging - A Collaborative Action Learning Approach

The retail packaging supply chain is experiencing intense scrutiny following increased public awareness of ocean plastic pollution and criticism of single use plastics. Industry must meet these challenges while maintaining standards in packaging functionality and food protection and remaining economically viable. Solutions are likely to require the input from all areas and levels, including manufacturers, retailers, government, consumers and campaign groups. The success of any innovation must take account of multiple future scenarios that could affect policy implementation and new product development. These complexities require collaboration between stakeholders and academic input is vital to evidence-based leadership and decision-making. This paper describes early findings from a new collaborative group, led by Leeds Beckett University, which is using the Futures and Foresight approach to develop collective goals for tackling the environmental challenge. It seeks to answer the question of how action learning can be used to create a collaborative approach to considering the future of sustainable packaging. The approach focused on allowing groups of stakeholders to find actions to take and questions for their futures against which learning could take place. The early findings report some initial agreements on the challenges that the industry currently faces.

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/...