I remember when my former colleague, Laura Zielinski, switched to Brand Packaging some years ago. It was before my own stint here with the Packaging Group when I was still running another publication of ours, Environmental Design+Construction (ED+C). As the name implies, ED+C covered sustainability in the architecture and construction world, and Laura had served as managing editor before stepping into the editor-in-chief role on Brand Packaging.

Having written about sustainability for so long, it was a natural decision for Laura to try and start incorporating the topic into stories for her new magazine. Some months later, I asked her about how the audience was taking to the subject. To this day, I still remember her response because it stunned me so much. She said, “Well, I actually had to stop trying to write about it because, Derrick, they just don’t care.”

What a difference time makes, right?

We talk about sustainability in packaging so much that even I get a little tired of it, and I only took my first job at our parent company specifically because I got to write about sustainability. But despite that shift in creating an open dialogue about it, implementing it can still be a daunting task.

That’s the reason why Intengine created a white paper about sustainability in packaging — to serve as a guide and to show the why in addition to the how. In the following podcast, I spoke with Connie Linder, CEO of Intengine, and Glenn Treliving, principal of Partners Packaging, who had an active role in developing content for the white paper. We hit on a lot of major topics and got in-depth, but there’s still a lot of conversation yet to be had.