D3.2: Future-fit sustainable packaging business models blueprint

The Future-Fit Sustainable Packaging Business Model Blueprint uses sustainable business model innovation as a systemic lens to accelerate the transition to circular plastic food packaging. It defines a business model as the way a business creates, delivers and captures value for its stakeholders, and circular business models as those that cycle, extend, intensify or dematerialise resource loops. These models follow the hierarchy of R-strategies, from Refuse and Rethink down to Recycle and Recover. In the plastic food packaging industry, they aim to eliminate, narrow, slow or close resource flows. Positioned along an upstream-to-downstream life-cycle continuum, they fall into five approaches: material, design, sufficiency, reuse and recovery innovation. To support strategic decision-making, the blueprint co-creates four future scenarios shaped by key trends such as sustainability requirements, digitalisation, convenience, hygiene, transparency and e-commerce, and framed by the tensions between individualism and collectivism and between efficiency and resilience. It sets out a portfolio of strategic, operational and relational system change levers to support the scale-up of circular business models. It also defines five key pathways: designing out unnecessary plastic packaging, designing for recycling, incorporating recycled content, scaling up reuse systems, and optimising collection and sorting. Finally, a backcasting approach from a 2040 vision of a circular plastic food packaging ecosystem produces a roadmap with three phases: formalising the transition by 2030, accelerating it by 2035, and strengthening it by 2040.