Sustainable Packaging Design Belongs at the Table
by Philo & Co 27/08/2026
Design, Printing & Packaging, Guide
by Philo & Co 27/08/2026
Design, Printing & Packaging, Guide
This article was contributed by Philo & Co.
On 6 September 2026, the World Packaging Organisation (WPO) will mark the first-ever World Packaging Day– a new annual, global celebration of packaging as, in WPO’s words, “the strategic enabler of our modern life in society”.
Packaging is how more than 8 billion people get safe, effective access to the goods they need, every day. It’s also arriving at a moment when the ground underneath it is genuinely shifting, extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes are going from voluntary to mandatory across the UK, EU and other regions, and consumers and regulators alike are losing patience with sustainability claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. WPO’s four founding pillars-packaging for progress, packaging against food waste, packaging and economic growth, and packaging and sustainability give a useful structure for looking at what “good” already looks like, in products already on shelf, ahead of that first inaugural day.
Progress in packaging means closing the gap between who a product was designed for and who actually needs to use it. That starts with designing for the full range of human ability rather than an average user, through ergonomic grips, one-handed opening, high-contrast type and tactile cues that let people identify and use a product independently. It also means treating safety and accessibility as complementary rather than competing goals, so a child-resistant closure doesn’t come at the cost of shutting out an older adult or someone with limited dexterity. The strongest examples are co-designed with the people who’ll actually use them.
ByStorm’s Betty and Margie grips slide onto the lipstick, mascara, nail polish and other cylindrical products (15–25mm wide) a person already owns, giving a steadier, more comfortable hold for people managing tremors, arthritis, hand fatigue or reduced finger curl. Betty is a round, palm-held grip. Margie is a flat, paddle-shaped grip for hands that don’t curl as easily. Both fit the same range of products.
Founder Storm Menzies, who has mild cerebral palsy, built the brand after needing to relearn her makeup routine following a hand injury. Every product goes through co-design with the disability community, tested and refined with real users ahead of launch.
The outcomes worth studying sit around the product as much as in it. ByStorm is NDIS registered, supporting NDIA-managed, plan-managed and self-managed funding. Grips carry a lifetime warranty. A public compatibility checker lets customers confirm fit before they buy, closing off a common source of hesitation in adaptive-tool purchases. The brand has also picked up editorial coverage in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Marie Claire, a sign that accessible design earns mainstream beauty-press attention on its own terms.
Source: bystormbeauty.com
Klarina’s Sunscreen and Blender, designed with product studio Tomorrow Lab, is an airless pump bottle with a built-in, replaceable foam blender that dispenses mineral SPF50 from any angle with one hand. Founder Hannah White’s starting insight was specific: parents already trusted mineral sunscreen as a formula. The obstacle was applying it well, especially on a moving child’s face. The design team built the whole product around closing that one gap: a cushioned foam head spreads the lotion, the pump works one-handed from any angle, and every part was positioned for a thumb or forefinger to operate easily.
Tomorrow Lab reports family feedback from development included parents saying toddlers began asking for “the soft sunscreen,” and that children as young as five could apply it themselves. The airless pump design also cuts contamination risk and lets the bottle dispense fully.
For brands: identifying and solving one precise point of daily friction can turn a product category people actively avoid into one their kids ask for by name.
Source: Dieline: Klarina sunscreen
Graphic Packaging International’s CleanClose paperboard carton, developed with Radienz Living for laundry detergent pods, is certified child-resistant under US regulation 16 CFR 1700.20. The patent-pending ChildBlock closure gives an audible click when secured, confirming the pack is closed.
The carton is made with 50% recycled fibre, is kerbside recyclable, and has been pre-qualified as Widely Recyclable under the How2Recycle programme. It holds up to 160 pods, ships flat for filling, and withstands 400 pounds of top-load compression, supporting self-palletisation for club-store supply chains. Graphic Packaging reports filled packs per pallet running at least 10% higher than with plastic pouches, a logistics gain sitting on top of the material switch.
For brands: this pack shows a safety certification, a lower-impact material and a supply-chain efficiency gain achieved in a single design cycle, evidence for what’s possible when child safety, recyclability and logistics are briefed together from the start rather than solved one at a time.
Source: PKN Packaging News: Graphic Packaging CleanClose
Reducing food waste starts with matching pack format and portion size to how people actually consume, and making resealability the default on fresh and perishable categories rather than a premium feature. Barrier and atmosphere technology should be chosen to match a product’s real spoilage mechanism and paired with clear behavioural guidance, such as date labels and storage cues, so packaging and communication work together. The best examples also look for ways to extend usable product life beyond first opening, and weigh shelf-life gains honestly against material footprint, since the most sustainable pack is often the one that prevents the most product being wasted.
Sainsbury’s own-label diced beef pack, developed with supplier ABP Beef over 18 months, won Gold in The Grocer’s 2025 New Product & Packaging Awards for Flexible Plastic Pack of the Year. The team trialled multiple materials and iterations, working across ABP’s engineering, materials and machinery functions to land on a final design.
The redesign cut pack size by 46%, saving an estimated 353,457 cubic metres of packaging a year, and reduced transport requirements by 54%. The pack is peelable and fully recyclable. Awards judges called it “a welcome step change in the industry, reducing pack size, saving plastic and saving shelf space for the consumer.”
For brands: this shows a sustained, multi-team redevelopment process can deliver a smaller pack, fewer truck movements and a recyclable end-of-life format at the same time, rather than treating those as separate projects with separate trade-offs.
Source: The Grocer Awards 2025
NestlĂ© is piloting a “Sniff, Look, Taste” logo on selected Maggi 2 Minute Noodles multipacks in Australia, developed with OzHarvest and informed by research from RMIT University and End Food Waste Australia. The logo targets a specific, evidenced behaviour: NestlĂ© cites OzHarvest research showing 58% of high-food-wasting households throw food out because they’re unsure what “Use By” and “Best Before” actually mean.
The design separates the two labels clearly. “Use By” is framed as a safety instruction, always followed. “Best Before” is framed as a quality check, worth assessing with a sniff, look and taste alongside the date. NestlĂ© Oceania’s regulatory, scientific and nutrition manager and an independent food scientist both worked on the messaging to keep it aligned with food safety guidance while giving households more confidence to use food that’s still good.
For brands: this pack solves a labelling comprehension problem with one small icon, built on named research partners and a clearly cited statistic, rather than a paragraph of small print most shoppers skip.
Source: PKN Packaging News: Nestlé Sniff, Look, Taste
Özler Tarım, a Turkish fresh produce exporter shipping to Japan, Canada, the US, the UK and Europe, worked with long-time partner Mondi to redesign its export packaging around one recurring problem: produce damage from long, unpredictable sea freight. The result is a 100% recyclable, double-wall corrugated tray built to withstand stacking pressure and the humidity and movement of extended sea voyages.
The flat-stackable design streamlined production and shipping, contributing directly to a 15% increase in production capacity at Ă–zler Tarım’s Adana facility, and helped eliminate box collapse and the damage claims that came with it. Ă–zler Tarım’s planning and supply chain manager reported that the packaging’s durability held up over long voyages and drew positive feedback from overseas clients.
For brands: the case shows a materials redesign aimed at reducing damage and waste paying back in production capacity and client-facing reliability too, not just in recyclability.
Source: Mondi: Özler Tarım case study
Economic growth depends on packaging that is right-sized for the carrier network as well as the shelf, since logistics economics now shape good design as much as retail presentation does. In a digital-first, direct-to-consumer world, packaging also has to perform as a brand and marketing asset. Building modularity and scalability into structural design lets a format extend across new SKUs, markets and channels without starting over, while exclusivity, used deliberately in premium and travel retail, can justify price and lift basket value. Reusable and returnable logistics assets, such as pallet wraps, totes and satchels, deserve the same attention, since B2B packaging is often the least visible waste stream in a supply chain.
Charlotte Tilbury worked with Lil Packaging to overhaul its ecommerce packaging after a distribution centre review found the brand was running too many box sizes, causing confusion for the fulfilment team, alongside heavy use of void fill and tape. The fix consolidated the range from seven box sizes down to four Breezeboxes, built around Charlotte Tilbury’s best-selling SKUs.
Lil Packaging’s patented integrated tissue paper cut void fill significantly and improved the unboxing experience. The Breezebox’s pop-up construction lifted fulfilment speed by at least 20%, particularly valuable during peak periods. Smaller parcel dimensions also reduced volumetric shipping weight, cutting shipping costs by more than 22%.
For brands: this is a case where four numbers, fewer box sizes, less void fill, faster fulfilment and lower shipping cost, all came from the same single redesign decision, which is what makes right-sizing worth prioritising even when a packaging refresh isn’t framed as a sustainability project.
Source: Lil Packaging: Charlotte Tilbury case study
Design Bridge and Partners created a limited-edition cocktail shaker gift set for Tanqueray No. Ten’s collaboration with Alessi, building on an earlier partnership the two brands ran at Milan Design Week 2024. The set pairs a bottle of Tanqueray No. Ten with Alessi’s Parisienne cocktail shaker, a stirrer and a jigger, finished in a copper colourway that echoes the brand’s bottle accents and its copper stills.
For brands: a second collaboration with the same design partner turns a one-off moment into a recognisable, repeatable platform, and pairing a spirits brand with an established design house (Alessi holds a portfolio of over 1,400 designs) lends instant design credibility that a spirits brand alone would take years to build.
Source: Design Bridge & Partners: Tanqueray x Alessi
ecoSPIRITS’ ecoTOTE is a reusable, closed-loop glass packaging format for spirits and wine, available in 4.5-litre and 1.75-litre sizes. Each ecoTOTE is shock- and tamper-resistant and reusable for approximately 100 cycles, eliminating up to 1,000 single-use glass bottles over its lifespan. Spirits are transferred from the ecoTOTE into reusable bottles or straight into glassware using ecoSPIRITS’ SmartPour dispense units, and the totes are cleaned, sanitised and refilled through the company’s own ecoPLANT processing sites.
ecoSPIRITS states the system delivers 60–90% less carbon emissions across packaging and distribution, and 95% less physical glass and cardboard waste, versus single-trip bottle logistics. The network now spans almost 3,000 venue partners and nearly 200 spirit and wine brands across 27 countries.
For brands: the model shows that circularity can be built into the distribution infrastructure itself, not just the container, since the gains come from a closed loop of cleaning, refilling and redeployment rather than a single material swap.
Source: ecospirits.global
Genuine sustainability means designing for available recovery systems that actually exists in-market, at scale, rather than a theoretical best case, and building circularity into the business model itself. Reduction should come before substitution, removing unnecessary layers and components and sustainability claims need to be backed genuine end-of-life data as regulatory scrutiny increases. The most credible examples also explore novel and bio-based materials only where they solve a genuine protection need, and keep circularity compatible with brand and shelf impact, because sustainable packaging still has to sell the product.
Prada Beauty has built refillability into the design of its Paradoxe and Paradigme fragrances from the outset, rather than offering it as a separate eco-line. Paradigme, the brand’s men’s fragrance, carries the same refill commitment. The brand also extended refill to its makeup pillars this year, including refillable lip balms, and marked World Refill Day (16 June) by publicly highlighting the option, addressing what Prada itself frames as low consumer awareness that fragrances can be refilled at all rather than replaced.
For brands: this shows refill can be designed into a flagship, full-price luxury product line from day one rather than bolted on as a discounted or “green” alternative sold alongside the main range, widening where circular packaging feels credible in the beauty category.
Source: Beauty Packaging: Prada Beauty World Refill Day
Bearhug makes reusable pallet wrap designed to replace single-use stretch film, hired rather than sold outright, targeting the plastic waste generated in warehouse and logistics operations. Bearhug’s own lifecycle data shows a wrap breaks even on plastic use after 8 reuses and on greenhouse gas emissions after 19 reuses, when tested against a 1,000-use benchmark that factors in a 50km return transport journey each time the wrap is reused. Independent tilt testing by Australian Compliance Labs found Bearhug’s wraps outperform 20 revolutions of standard stretch film for structural integrity, and Bearhug states its wraps can be applied faster than plastic film, both manually and with automation.
For brands: this shows the case for switching an unglamorous, high-volume input like pallet wrap can rest on independently tested performance and break-even numbers, not just an environmental claim.
Source: bearhugpalletwraps.com
Lush’s package-free “Naked” range, running since 2005, removes packaging entirely on products like shampoo bars, solid shower gels and shower gummies rather than seeking a lower-impact material for it. Lush reports that 58% of its individual products sold in 2025 were package-free, with 45% of its year-round range now sold without packaging, and that the programme has avoided more than 15,000 metric tonnes of plastic since it began. Lush is candid about the adoption barrier: the brand says practicality concerns and unfamiliarity with formats like solid shampoo bars are the main things holding customers back, which is why it pairs the products with in-store demonstrations, storage guidance and reusable tins.
For brands: this shows package-free can be a genuine long-term retail strategy rather than a one-off campaign, provided the product itself, solid formats designed to work without a container, is built for a packaging-free life from the start, and provided the brand also invests in solving the customer’s practical “how do I use this” question, not just the removal itself.
Source: Packaging Insights: Lush package-free range
The regulatory ground is shifting under all four pillars at once. In the UK, Extended Producer Responsibility is live meaning design decisions now show up directly on a business’s cost line, not just its sustainability report. In Australia, the Environmental Ministers Meeting in September is due to provide an update on the future of packaging regulations, with mandatory design standards and EPR being discussed. None of this is optional homework anymore — it’s the operating environment every brand above is already designing into.
Against that backdrop, the case studies above point to one conclusion: packaging cannot be judged on a single metric.
The brands doing this well, from a two-person accessible beauty startup to a spirits company redesigning its entire distribution model, are treating packaging as a system, not a single decision.
As the industry prepares for the inaugural World Packaging Day on 6 September 2026, that’s the standard worth holding every pack to: it has to be functional, it has to be fit for purpose across the whole value chain– from the factory floor to the person opening it at home- and it has to embed sustainability from the first design brief, not bolt it on once the regulator asks. Packaging is never “just” packaging. It’s the last thing standing between a product and the person who needs it, and increasingly, it’s where brands either build trust or lose it.
Get involved: organisations everywhere are invited to mark 6 September under #WorldPackagingDay — a webinar, an open house, an internal packaging review, a social campaign. However you choose to participate, the inaugural year is the moment to start treating packaging as the strategic function it already is.
Philo & co works with FMCG brands and design agencies to turn these pillars into sustainable pack-level decisions. From recyclability assessments to circularity strategy and EPR-ready material choices. Whether you’re briefing a redesign from scratch or auditing an existing range against the standard set out above, we’ve distilled what good looks like into two practical starting points.
Free 5-step sustainable packaging design guide for design agencies
Free 5-step sustainable packaging design guide for FMCG brands