Respack: Responsible packaging demands more than recycling: Dr Ashish Lele

At a time when sustainability commitments, regulatory mandates and consumer expectations are reshaping the packaging landscape, Dr Ashish Lele, director of CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), delivered a clear message to the packaging industry: circularity can no longer be treated as an afterthought.

Speaking on the topic of responsible packaging for FMCG products, Dr Lele outlined the complex reality facing brand owners and packaging developers. While packaging is indispensable for protecting products, extending shelf life and enabling branding, the materials and structures that make packaging effective are often the same ones that make it difficult to recycle.

"The driver today is circularity," Dr Lele said.

The challenge is substantial. India produced approximately 11.5 million tonnes of plastics-based packaging in 2020. While only a fraction of that enters the waste stream annually, the sheer volume is daunting. Globally, just around 9% of plastic waste is recycled, highlighting the scale of the problem.

Yet the push for change is coming from multiple directions. Regulatory frameworks such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are forcing companies to take responsibility for packaging waste, while consumers — particularly GenZ and millennials — are increasingly demanding environmentally responsible products and packaging.

According to Dr Lele, these pressures are driving companies to rethink packaging design, material selection and end-of-life management.

The performance paradox

Packaging for FMCG products is required to perform a wide range of functions. It must comply with regulations, display critical information, provide excellent printability, protect products from contamination, withstand the rigours of transportation and remain convenient for consumers to use.

These requirements apply across primary packaging, which directly contains the product; secondary packaging, which groups products together; and tertiary packaging, which enables transportation and distribution.

The difficulty, Dr Lele explained, is that no single material can satisfy all these requirements.

Polyolefins such as polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) offer excellent moisture resistance, low cost and ease of processing. PET and nylon provide superior barrier properties against oxygen and moisture, making them ideal for preserving shelf life.

"Different materials have different properties, some of which are suitable for FMCG packaging and some of which are not," Dr Lele noted.

The industry's solution has been multilayer packaging, combining different materials to deliver the required functionality. However, this approach has created one of packaging's biggest circularity challenges.

"There is no one material alone that can do everything. Hence the need to put them together and create multilayer structures, which has become the bane of circularity," he said.

Compounding the problem are the tie layers or adhesive layers used to bond dissimilar materials together. These layers are essential for performance but make material recovery and recycling significantly more difficult.

Mechanical recycling: Necessary but imperfect

Recycling remains one of the industry's primary strategies for improving circularity. However, Dr Lele challenged the notion that recycling alone can solve the problem.

Mechanical recycling, the most widely practised recycling method today, often results in what he described as "downcycling". During repeated processing, polymers undergo thermal and mechanical degradation, reducing their performance and limiting future applications.

PET remains the most successful example of large-scale recycling. India recycles around 1.75 million tonnes of PET bottles annually, creating a well-established organised-sector industry worth approximately INR 3,500 crore. Much of this recycled PET is converted into polyester staple fibre for textile applications.

However, the process typically does not produce bottle-to-bottle recycling. Instead, high-performance packaging material is transformed into lower-value applications.

The challenges become even greater for polyolefins, which dominate FMCG packaging. Collection, sorting, washing and processing systems struggle with contamination, mixed materials, labels and inconsistent feedstock quality.

According to Dr Lele, one of the industry's biggest problems is the variability of post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials. While regulations increasingly require recycled content, the quality of PCR often remains inconsistent.

Researchers at NCL are studying how recycling processes alter molecular weight distributions and material properties in order to better understand why recycled plastics behave differently from virgin polymers.

Chemical recycling gains attention

As mechanical recycling reaches its limitations, chemical recycling is attracting growing interest.

PET already has established chemical recycling pathways, including glycolysis, methanolysis and hydrolysis. Among these, glycolysis is the most widely adopted, breaking PET down into monomers that can be repolymerised into new PET.

Dr Lele also highlighted ongoing research into chemical recycling of polyolefins, an area widely regarded as one of the industry's toughest challenges. NCL researchers have demonstrated processes that convert polyethylene waste into valuable olefinic compounds and chemical feedstocks.

The laboratory is also developing technologies to separate and recycle multilayer packaging through combinations of delamination, selective dissolution and depolymerisation.

While promising, Dr Lele acknowledged that chemical recycling technologies still face hurdles related to economics, catalyst costs and scalability.

"The science is progressing, but translating that science into commercially viable technologies remains challenging," he said.

Biocompostable plastics are not a silver bullet

Biocompostable plastics have emerged as another potential route towards responsible packaging, but Dr Lele urged caution.

Materials such as PLA and PBAT are increasingly available for packaging applications, yet they continue to face significant challenges, including higher costs, lower heat resistance and inadequate waste-management infrastructure.

India currently lacks widespread industrial composting facilities, making end-of-life management difficult. Equally problematic is the mixing of compostable and conventional plastics within existing waste streams.

Dr Lele also pointed to concerns revealed through life-cycle assessments.

"If you do a complete LCA, it does not necessarily sound so great," he said.

He stressed the need for improved plastic identification codes and better segregation systems to prevent compostable plastics from contaminating recycling streams.

The rise of monomaterial packaging

Among the emerging solutions discussed, monomaterial packaging generated particular interest.

Advances in material science are enabling single-material structures to deliver barrier properties that once required complex multilayer constructions. Dr Lele cited examples of polypropylene films coated with ultra-thin layers of aluminium oxide and silicon oxide, significantly improving oxygen barrier performance while retaining recyclability.

Such innovations could help reconcile performance requirements with circularity goals.

As FMCG companies seek packaging solutions that satisfy regulatory, consumer and environmental expectations simultaneously, Dr Lele believes the future will depend on a combination of better design, improved recycling technologies and new material innovations.

For the packaging industry, the message was clear: responsible packaging is no longer just about replacing one material with another. It requires rethinking the entire system — from design and material selection to collection, recycling and end-of-life management.