Beyond innovation: Why circularity’s real bottleneck is human

When the packaging industry convenes at Packaging Innovations & Empack Birmingham 2026, leaders will explore how collaboration, behaviour, and systems - not just technology - will unlock true circularity.

As the packaging industry looks ahead to 2026, attention will turn to Packaging Innovations & Empackat Birmingham’s NEC, the UK’s leading event for suppliers, brands, and innovators to explore the future of packaging sustainability. Here, attendees will witness the latest materials, machinery, and solutions that promise to redefine how we produce, use, and recover packaging. Yet, while the technology and materials exist to make packaging circular, the industry faces a far more complex challenge: humans, systems, and incentives.

The science is ready. From polymers derived from fish waste to bottles designed for repeated reuse, innovation is abundant. The friction lies in aligning governance, economics, logistics, and human behaviour to make circularity operational at scale. It is in this very context that thought leaders, policymakers, and suppliers will gather in Birmingham to tackle these intertwined challenges.

As Charlotte Davies, Senior Consultant - Resource Efficiency & Circularity at Beyondly, observes, “The tech is not the bottleneck. We are already seeing credible circular innovations… These prove technical feasibility. Embracing circular principles can require businesses to totally rethink activities or strategies. For example, packaging reuse systems are not just a new pack; it’s a new operation.”

Redesigning business models, from logistics and hygiene flows to retail operations and customer experience, remains daunting for many. “Drastic change to existing business practices often requires significant upfront cost and resource, despite future savings or environmental benefits,” Davies adds. “It’s primarily human: governance, incentives, market stability, and change management. Innovation matters, but without stable policy, ring-fenced funding, aligned price signals, and coordinated supply chains, even great science underperforms.”

Systems, standards and shared responsibility

For Alice Rackley, CEO of Polytag, circularity is inseparable from the global supply chain architecture. “The circularity challenge is complex because supply chains are complex and global, with multiple conflicting value drivers. Achieving both positive commercial and positive sustainable outcomes is often impossible. That’s why legislative frameworks and financial levers - particularly taxes, fees, and fines - are important to align commercial and sustainable outcomes.”

Regulations are critical, but interoperability is equally essential. “Use global open standards,” Rackley says. “Unless every actor in the value chain can participate effectively, thanks to equitable access to information and data, and through the use of interoperable tools and services, there is no chance of effective collaboration.”

Gillian Garside-Wight, Consulting Director at Aura, underscores the multi-layered nature of the challenge. “It’s a combination of factors: infrastructure remains a major challenge for disposal and circularity, but consumer behaviour also needs to evolve, alongside the biggest hurdle of all… cost.” Achieving balance, she says, requires “regulations that incentivise change, industry innovation to deliver viable alternatives, infrastructure capable of supporting a circular economy, and consumer behaviour that keeps materials within the recovery loop.”

“This is difficult,” she concedes, “but not impossible. However, the cost of change, impacting all stakeholders - from recovery and recycling infrastructure to the final cost of goods - can be hard to absorb or manage. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) will help accelerate progress, but much more education is needed, particularly consumer education, to shift the mindset from single-use towards circularity.”

Events like Packaging Innovations & Empack provide an invaluable platform for this exchange. By bringing together suppliers, recyclers, retailers, regulators, and brands, the event mirrors the very cross-value chain collaboration Garside-Wight advocates, offering attendees a real-world sandbox to test ideas and partnerships.

The human feedback loop

Circularity depends as much on people as on process. Chris Smith (MSc (Eng), CRWM) describes this as “Incentivised behaviour change in humans and timely scale-up of innovation, an iterative open-ended challenge - it is feedback between the two.”

Yet policy and investment gaps leave this feedback loop fragile. “Plastic Recyclers Europe recorded nearly one million tonnes of lost external plastic recycling capacity since 2023 — the same pressures in the UK prevail,” Chris Smith, Lead Consultant - Resource Efficiency & Circularity at Beyondly, notes. “Chasing outdated and unsupported targets will not work in the absence of political leadership, ring-fenced funding, upskilling, confidence building, and de-risking of pilots and trials — all of which are relationship and trust-based initiatives.”

Alex Hilton, Director of Policy & Public Affairs, at Beyondly, frames the problem as a systems gap: “The knowledge, insight and materials exist to deliver truly sustainable packaging. The challenge remaining is one of connecting the disparate parts of the system. We consider the materials, collection, waste, and reprocessing system as one integrated machine, where it is instead a disconnected agglomeration of actors. Therefore, the innovation is in true cross-value-chain collaboration.”

This is where events like Packaging Innovations & Empack matter: they are not just trade shows but microcosms of the entire packaging ecosystem - a place where fragmented systems meet and conversations spark aligned action.

Collaboration beyond competition

For Garside-Wight, collaboration is central. “The packaging industry has traditionally thrived on differentiation and competitive advantage,” she says. “However, the challenges we face today, particularly around sustainability, demand a shift in mindset. Real collaboration does not mean removing competition; it means recognising that shared goals can deliver greater value than isolated efforts.”

She points to the Retailer Forum in the U.S., where Walmart, Target, Amazon, and CVS have joined forces under the Sustainable Packaging Coalition to tackle shared challenges. “If this level of cooperation is possible among retail giants,” she asks, “what is stopping the rest of the industry?”

Misconceptions persist. Collaboration is often mistakenly equated with giving away trade secrets or eroding competitive advantage. In reality, she notes, it “focuses on shared challenges - such as infrastructure, standards, and sustainability goals - creating collective benefits that no single player can achieve alone. It is about being greater than the sum of its parts.”

Smith echoes this: “Packaging remains a competitive industry; sustainability needs to minimise, if it cannot eradicate, the siloed virtue-signalling successes when there is a greater good. There are good examples of genuine collaboration that tackle future challenges, e.g., the Plastic Pact and its new all-materials refresh can unite the industry, and Simpler Recycling is the biggest opportunity yet to focus on outcomes collectively.”

Events like Birmingham provide a rare physical space where competitors, suppliers, and regulators can interact, exchange insights, and explore collaborative solutions in real time, exactly the type of cross-pollination these experts advocate.

Who’s missing from the conversation

Garside-Wight warns that many voices remain absent. “When sustainability strategies are discussed in the packaging industry, the conversation often centres on brand owners, converters, and retailers. But critical voices are frequently absent, and their absence comes at a cost.”

Raw material producers, recyclers, and local authorities are essential to ensure sustainable sourcing, close the loop, and align infrastructure and policy. Without them, even highly recyclable packaging can end up in landfill. The consequences include fragmented solutions, missed innovation, infrastructure gaps, and slower progress.

True sustainability, she argues, “is a system-wide challenge, not a single-player game. To succeed, we need every link in the chain at the table, working together to create solutions that are practical, scalable, and truly circular.”

Measuring progress and building trust

While measurement is vital, Rackley warns against perfectionism: “You have to have quantitative benchmarks and targets in order to agree that there has been, or will be, progress towards a goal. What gets measured gets managed. But accept that approximately right is better than exactly wrong.”

Yet, she adds, “you can’t measure relationship strength - that’s too subjective if the objective is ‘measuring’.” Progress in circularity is not only numerical but relational, dependent on trust and collaboration. The Ecotrace Programme, she notes, is a leading example, leveraging barcode-level data to coordinate action across the single-use plastics value chain.

Smith points to the CETF as another model: “Interventions that view systems, not just sectors, and drive political action are what’s needed. We can look to industry forums, all-player bodies that unite within their sector to then collaborate - this is a missing link.”

Partnership as the multiplier

“Collaboration isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the multiplier that makes innovation faster, stronger, and more impactful,” says Garside-Wight. Partnerships bring together expertise in design, supply chain, recycling, and policy. They enable systemic change, accelerate innovation, and share risk.

“The next big leap in sustainable packaging might not come from a lab,” she adds, “it could come from a boardroom where competitors, suppliers, and regulators sit together to solve shared challenges.” Smith underscores this cultural shift: “Trickle-down leadership meets bottom-up support. Sustainable procurement tools and upskilling are necessary. Collaboration and support can help bridge gaps.”

A system, not a target

Circularity is not a single destination but a dynamic system that balances business, planet, and people. Smith concludes, “The CETF has been the first attempt to do just this - we eagerly await the outcomes and the UK progressing to thinking of circular economy as a dynamic system, not a target-setting exercise - that will not work.”

Rackley reminds us that collaboration begins with mindset: “Recognising that many commercial advantages can still be found despite the essential need to cooperate on key issues that affect communities, the natural world, and our planet’s equilibrium; it is not necessary to take a capitalist (exploitative) approach to everything.”

The future of circular packaging will not be decided by the next breakthrough material but by whether systems, incentives, and people can align around a shared goal. Because circularity is not just a science problem - it’s a human one. And only by working together, across sectors, silos, and geographies, can the loop finally be closed.

And as the industry convenes at Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026, the opportunity to demonstrate and accelerate this collaborative, cross-value chain approach will be on full display. Don’t miss your chance to be part of the conversation, register for your free visitor pass today and join the future of packaging.