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Q&A
States across the US are enacting sustainable packaging laws, but Ameripen is also clocking increased dialog and stagnant action at the federal level.
CosmeticsDesign spoke with Dan Felton, executive director of packaging trade association Ameripen, about what's happening at the federal level and what the cosmetics industry can expect to see in sustainable packaging regulation next.
Before reading this article, readers can brush up on what sustainable packaging regulation is happening at the state level in this CosmeticsDesign article.
Tell me about the kind of transition from state-based regulation into federal regulation.
There's a lot more conversation happening at the federal level, but right now, there's nothing moving at the federal level. As typical, the states are the incubator for ideas, and then at some point, they may gain critical mass.
While some packaging suppliers rely on offsets to claim to remove ocean plastic, Seacliff Beauty is doing it quite literally.
Seacliff Beauty became the exclusive beauty supplier for the #tide ocean material plastic resin earlier this year and the company has spent the time since at trade shows and online promoting the new packaging option.
Brian Saputo, executive vice president of Seacliff, told CosmeticsDesign the partnership is part of broader efforts to curb the flow of plastic packaging into the world's landfills and oceans. For Seacliff and #tide specifically, that means pulling plastic out of waters near Malaysia to be turned back into packaging.
“If you go up 40,000 feet, the problem that we're trying to solve is how to close the loop,” Saputo said. “It is finding a solution for an ongoing problem and trying to, no pun intended, stem the tide of all this plastic going into the ocean, how we collect it and bring it back into the consumer world.”
Animal testing was the 20th-century answer to product safety issues, and as the 21st-century cosmetics industry turns away from it some replacements are still up in the air.
A research team out of the UK, José Silva et al., recently published a review in Cosmetics of alternatives to animal testing, along with the history of animal testing and the context for the move away from it.
According to José Silva et al., animal testing in consumer packaged goods was largely initiated by a 1936 report in the US covering injury and death caused by food and drug products. To promote safety for consumers, the US legally required animal testing, which also set off opposition from the animal rights movement.
In 2009 the EU started to phase out animal testing in cosmetics, and since then José Silva et al. said, in cosmetics, the term “New Approach Methodology” or NAM has described alternatives to animal testing in assessing chemical hazards and risk assessment.
As consumers are hungering for sustainable packaging, state legislators are pushing the consumer packaged goods industry to change how it does business.
Several states in the US have recently passed legislation that, when implemented, may affect not only brands but the broader packaging supply chain selling across regulatory boundaries.
Dan Felton, executive director of Ameripen, told CosmeticsDesign that while some level of sustainable packaging regulation isn’t entirely new to the CPG industry in the US, states like California are bringing in more aggressive standards.
“A lot of the policies that are coming out are making some of those sustainability decisions for the brand owners and manufacturers,” Felton said. “Companies are trying to do the right thing, but some policymakers are really pushing the envelope in making some decisions for those brand owners.”
Eastman Renew and Pact Collective have announced a new partnership in the pursuit of circularity in beauty packaging, but there is more to know about both organizations and the mission.
The advanced plastic recycler and the non-profit announced in a release a newly formed partnership to address the end-of-life for plastic packaging and create new solutions to close the loop on beauty packages.
While the partnership has not yet determined what those solutions will look like yet, Eastman cosmetics packaging segment manager Tara Cary said in the release the organizations are aligned in the goal to increase beauty-to-beauty recycling.
Eastman Renew is able to take any type of waste plastic and, using advanced recycling methods, create a resin that is molecularly identical to virgin plastic.
