Brand owners on shelf life, recyclability, EPR and the uncomfortable truths about civic behaviour

In virtually every packaging debate, the brand owner ends up holding the problem. They commission the structure, they set the shelf-life specification, they carry the Extended Producer Responsibility liability, and they are the ones whose name sits on the product when it turns up in a landfill. At the Indian Packaging Summit, the second panel, A 360 degrees Brand Owner’s perspective, brought six brand owners and packaging specialists to discuss what that responsibility actually looks like in practice — and whether the current regulatory framework is helping or hindering their ability to do anything meaningful about it.

Moderated by Tushar Bandyopadhyay of the Indian Centre for Plastics in Environment, the session ranged across profitability versus sustainability, the technical constraints that make multi-material structures so hard to abandon, the patchy roll-out of EPR beyond plastics, and what it will actually take to change the way ordinary people think about packaging waste.

Trupti Bagwe from Pidilite said what several panellists were thinking: sustainability has become a value-addition argument rather than a cost burden, but it only lands if it is baked into business thinking from the outset rather than bolted on later. She said, “It is more to do with long-term association with sustainability hand in hand with profitability. We have to drive it from heart and soul.” 

Amit Kale of Reliance Retail added to Bagwe’s perspective and said that everyone in the room wants to make profits and that sustainability only moves up the agenda when the additional cost of staying unsustainable starts to outweigh the cost of changing. He added that dynamic is shifting, but slowly, and the push for change still comes largely from regulatory pressure rather than from consumer demand strong enough to move volume.

Shelf-life debate 
Then Bandyopadhyay threw the question of  shelf life to the panel. Chinmay Dandekar from Godrej said that India’s geography and climate are not like Europe’s. A product that needs to reach the furthest corner of a continent-sized distribution network, survive two full seasonal cycles, cope with wide humidity swings and reach the consumer in the same condition as the day it left the factory, demands a very different structural brief to a product shifting off a shelf in Stuttgart.

Standard shelf life in Godrej’s categories runs from 18 to 24 months. That is two environmental cycles. The complex multi-material laminate structures that make people in the West are, in many cases, the only engineering solution available. And every time a brand owner tries to simplify those structures — introducing recycled content, moving to a mono-material, reducing layers — something somewhere in the specification shifts. He said, “Any layer that you tinker with has some kind of implication anywhere else. That is the dilemma many brand owners are currently facing.” 

The specific challenge Dandekar flagged is the EPR trap created by moving to polyolefinic structures. BOPP, which is where most recyclable mono-material flexible packaging ends up, currently has no post-consumer recycled content available other than through chemical recycling — which does not stack up economically. So the brand owner is caught: they cannot meet their EPR targets by going recyclable in the conventional sense, but they cannot stay with multi-layer laminates without falling foul of recyclability expectations.
Kale reinforced the shelf-life point from a different angle. Even within a single product category, shelf-life requirements vary significantly by brand and market position. A high-turnover glucose biscuit shifts in days; a new entrant in the same aisle needs to protect its product for months in case sales are slow. A common structural specification across a category would force everyone to engineer for the worst case, which is more material, not less.

Nishant Sukumar of CavinKare put a more optimistic frame on it. The shelf-life system has been built up over four or five decades around materials that are only now being questioned. Sustainable alternatives have been in the conversation for perhaps six or seven years. There is hope, he said, that the whole system will get reset but it will take time, and the reset needs to come from several directions at once, including the regulatory one.

Bandyopadhyay raised a point that generated real discussion about the regulator’s role in  capping shelf-life declarations. Sukumar said that for product categories where the current standards far exceed actual market need, it would level the playing field instantly. His example was shampoo. His company declares a two-year shelf life on certain products. In practice, they sell out within three months. A six-month declaration would be more than sufficient — but no individual brand will blink first.

Kale added a note of caution that shelf life is calculated from the last unit to leave the shelf, not the average. If you mandate six months across a category and the tail of slow-moving product has not shifted by month five, you end up with a disposal problem at both ends — unsaleable product and its packaging hitting the waste stream simultaneously. Regulation needs to be granular, he argued, not sweeping.

Designing sustainably  
Rajendra Shetty from Abbott Healthcare described a shift in how pharma approaches packaging design. For most of its history, the sustainability of end-of-life was not a checkpoint in the design process. It is now. Every new design has to address what happens to the materials after use — which polymers are being used, whether they are from the same family, and how they will be separated or directed through an appropriate end-of-life pathway. Products already in the market are being reviewed through a lifecycle management lens.

Abbott’s internal sustainability goals for 2030 are more stringent than the industry standard, Shetty said. In primary packaging — the layer in direct contact with the medicine or device — there is limited room to manoeuvre, so the focus is on reducing weight, eliminating PVC where possible and replacing it with materials like APET, PBAT or PLA.

Bagwe from Pidilite added a practical example that illustrates how incremental design changes add up. Pump dispensers that once contained 11 or 12 components, including metal parts, have been progressively redesigned to use plastic throughout. Functionality and consumer experience are unchanged; the recyclability profile is transformed. Once the new design is locked in, she noted, subsequent iterations tend to continue in the same direction.
 
The ground reality of EPR 
Deepak Dandavate of Veedol traced the arc of EPR awareness since 2016. Industry understanding of what the framework requires has grown substantially, driven partly by CPCB but also by brands themselves using their communications to build consumer awareness of packaging responsibility. The direction of travel is right, he said, even if the pace is not yet fast enough.

Dandekar widened the conversation to cover the extension of EPR beyond plastics. Metal, glass and paper are now entering the framework. The manufacturers in those sectors have pushed back with a reasonable question: recycled content has been an unwritten norm in their industries for years — what exactly is new? Dandekar said, “In the plastic space the framework is fairly established. In the non-plastic space we are lagging. The mechanism for filing EPR for metals, glass or paper simply is not there yet.” 

Kale offered a counterpoint that reframed the problem. Metal and paper recycling, he argued, have been circular economies in India for generations. The scrap dealer who has been buying metal from households since before most people in the room were born is the original extended producer responsibility scheme. The contribution of EPR in these sectors is not to create recycling where none existed — it is to formalise and document a system that already functions, and to capture the data in a way that regulators and auditors can use.

The multi-pronged problem of multi-layer packaging 
One of the most technically detailed exchanges of the session concerned what might actually be done with the multi-material laminate structures that cannot yet be moved on structural or commercial grounds. Dandekar said Godrej is actively working with recyclers on delamination technology — processes capable of separating the substrate layers before they enter the recycling stream. If separation becomes viable at scale, reverse-printed PET-poly laminates may offer better density-segregation potential than many structures currently considered recyclable.

The broader material science optimism came from Sukumar. New materials are arriving, but they are not yet meeting the shelf-life performance requirements of the categories they need to serve. The gap is real, but it is a gap that will close — the question is timeline and whether the regulatory framework can be calibrated to move at the same pace as the material science, rather than ahead of it.

Where does the responsibility lie? 
The final question Bandyopadhyay put to the panel concerned the new four-category waste segregation now mandatory under India’s revised Solid Waste Management Rules. Who carries the responsibility for making sure the public actually understands and follows it? 

Their take on public awareness and the road ahead

Deepak Dandavate Veedol	Awareness must be built from childhood upwards. Brand owners carry a share of responsibility, but no single entity can own it. Education, civic culture and manufacturer incentives all have a role.
Amit Kale Reliance Retail	Civic sense is the root cause most people avoid naming. Regulatory nudges on shelf life need careful handling — truncating them without readiness risks larger disposal problems.
Nishant Sukumar CavinKare	There is no looking back. Develop everything with sustainability built in from the start. The technology will catch up.
Rajendra Shetty Abbott Healthcare	Government policy is moving. The bigger lever is individual behaviour. If each person changes at home, the aggregate effect is transformative.
Trupti Bagwe Pidilite	It is not only about companies. There is no Planet B. Sustainability has to be embedded at home, at work and in children from an early age.
Chinmay Dandekar Godrej	Reduce material intensity first. Fewer materials in circulation means lower collection targets, lower PCR requirements and a better economic case for change. More government incentives are needed to keep businesses viable while they transition.

Conclusion 
Nobody disagreed that brand owners sit at the centre of the packaging responsibility web. What the session surfaced is how much of the work that needs doing lies outside their direct control: the pace at which new materials reach commercial viability, the architecture of regulatory frameworks that are still being built, the civic behaviours that have been decades in the forming.