Sealed Air Global Impact Report

Sealed Air

How Does SEE Define Innovation?

Innovation is much more than just creating a new bundle for a client. Innovation is the process of fusing ideas, technologies, and business models to address customer concerns while foreseeing potential side effects.

Before developing solutions, SEE strives to comprehend the needs of the customer market. From packaging performance, digital information, and automation needs to sustainability, circularity, and carbon footprint, we consider everything. By using this all-encompassing strategy, we generate customer and societal value that outweighs the cost of packaging.

More and more, innovation is required to address significant, complicated problems that lie outside the purview of any one organisation. To be genuinely inventive today, one must also be truly collaborative.

What Challenges Does SEE Have with Innovation?

Understanding how to promote sustainability without having unexpected effects is one of our top innovation problems. For instance, if package performance is impacted or product waste increases, simplifying flexible plastic packaging materials to facilitate mechanical recycling may actually have negative effects. We must therefore comprehend how diverse aspects of products and the supply chain might have an impact on sustainability as a whole.

I prefer to use the analogy that it would be wiser to use a compass for this voyage than a speedometer when discussing sustainable design. It is better to use a compass than a speedometer, which simply indicates how quickly you will arrive at your destination.

How Do Innovation and SEE’s Sustainability Pledge Fit Together?

When creating customer material solutions that also adhere to our 2025 Sustainability Pledge, we make every effort to ensure that recycled or renewable content and recyclability are top of mind. This can be particularly challenging in the current environment due to a lack of recycling infrastructure, a dearth of recycled or renewable materials for food or healthcare uses, and subpar performance of alternatives that might have a negative influence on the climate.

For both mechanical and sophisticated recycling procedures, SEE is in the forefront of efforts to design plastic packaging that is simpler to recycle and contains recycled content. In order to improve the performance of fibre and paper-based packaging systems for product protection, we are simultaneously leading innovations in these fields.

Think of the new fibre tray from SEE for the packing of fresh proteins. It wasn’t just a matter of transitioning from plastic to paper. We considered the fibre tray’s total effects on the output and carbon footprint of our clients. We took into account the difficulty recycling food packaging for consumers. Most essential, we made sure the replacement material delivered all performance qualities required to safeguard and market the product.

How is SEE collaborating to promote sustainability and innovation?

In today’s atmosphere of intense competition, industries must work together for the common benefit. While SEE is at the forefront of several significant circularity collaborations, we want to inspire others in our sector to follow us and collaborate with us to advance infrastructure for sorting and recycling, post-consumer collecting, and material design. The difficulty lies in convincing additional businesses to collaborate in order to show that a circular economy for flexible packaging is feasible and in supporting the investments, education, and advocacy needed to grow our industry.