(Credit: Vital Pet Life)Vital Pet Life is incorporating recyclable packaging with the first product in its Vital Pet Life Plus line, and is also becoming a member of How2Recycle and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. The company cites the fact that data from the 2019 GlobalWebIndex, Sustainable Packaging Unwrapped data shows 64% of consumers say recyclability is the most important aspect of environmentally friendly packaging.
Vital Pet Life has started infusing sustainability into many business aspects, such as sourcing, formulating, and packaging. Its Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil product is Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified 100% sustainable, for example. Green Lipped Mussels, one of the four ingredients in Vital Pet Life's Mobility powder, is recognized as sustainable and rated as "best choice" by the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch. The "best choice" rating indicates that GLM aquaculture is highly sustainable.
According to How2Recycle, recyclable packing is important to “reduce confusion by creating a clear, well-understood, and nationally recognized label that enables companies to convey to consumers how to recycle a package, improve the reliability, completeness, and transparency of recyclability claims, provide a labeling system that is designed to follow the US Federal Trade Commission and Competition Bureau Canada’s guidance, and increase the availability and quality of recycled material.”
Other companies looking to improve recyclable packaging include Bumble Bee Seafood, which is eliminating an estimated 23 million pieces of plastic waste per year by changing its multipack can product packaging from shrink wrap to readily recyclable paperboard cartons, and toy company Melissa & Doug, which has also joined the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and How2Recycle and will begin rolling out How2Recycle labels on its packaging by the end of this year.
Despite an overall drive among manufacturers to use packaging that is more sustainable — the sustainable packaging market is expected to see a 5.5% per year increase through 2027, according to IMARC Group — pet food packaging is becoming increasingly difficult to recycle, says Euromonitor International. “As the pet humanisation trend drives growth in plastic pouches or containers that cannot be recycled, more widely recycled packaging types such as metal or paper are losing share, which is making pet care packaging less sustainable,” the market research company writes.
