Sustainable Labeling

Pressure-sensitive labeling has come a long way since Ray Stanton (Stan) Avery started an entire industry in the 1930s. It is the method of choice in many consumer product categories, capturing close to a 50 percent market share in North America.

For all its benefits, the industry is facing serious challenges on the sustainability front. In this day and age, it's hard to conceive of a mainstream product system/category that generates about 50 percent waste. But that's the level inherent in traditional pressure-sensitive labeling, with its matrix waste generated at the printers/converters and the spent release liner waste in the hands of the end-user products companies.

The industry is gearing up to address the issue on many fronts with the ultimate goal of reducing/eliminating this waste from finding its way into landfills. Great strides are being made to reduce the amount of material being used in the first place with thinner and thinner facestocks and liners. Other efforts are being made to recycle or even use the waste material as a fuel source. (Calvin Frost of Channeled Resources Group is a tireless advocate in this area.) And the efforts in the area of linerless labels are gaining more and more traction.

The industry as a whole is in the relatively early stages of generating solutions to address a significant and complex problem. It's not every day that someone comes up with an idea that starts a whole new industry, but there's lots of talented people in this industry and I believe we will begin to see significant progress in the not-too-distant future.