How to Reduce Plastic in Packaging in 2026

Plastic reduction isn’t a side project anymore, it’s a business requirement. Between tightening regulation, rising material costs, and customers who genuinely check the pack before they check the price, 2026 is the year “we’ll get to sustainability eventually” stops being a viable strategy. At Tyler Packaging, sustainability is built into everything we do, from the materials we choose to the way we measure our impact, and it’s our ultimate goal to achieve net-zero contamination.

Here’s where we tell brands to start.

If you take one thing from this article, make it this: switching from rigid to flexible packaging is the single most effective plastic-reduction move available to most brands right now.

Rigid packaging; bottles, tubs, jars, is built to hold its shape unsupported, and that structural strength demands more material. Flexible packaging; pouches, sachets, films, sacks, relies on the product itself for shape, so it needs far less material to do the same job. Our own conventional laminate range is built with up to 70% less material than rigid packaging found elsewhere, and that reduction carries through the whole range, recyclable and compostable included.

We measure our environmental performance across seven pillars; water use, mineral resource use, human impact, freshwater eutrophication, fossil fuel use, freshwater ecotoxicity, and greenhouse gas emissions, because “reduce plastic” only means something if you can show the effect. Based on our third-party verified life cycle assessment data, switching a million 2kg bags from PET/PETMET/PE to our monomaterial recyclable range delivers:

• 16% less fossil fuel use in production, compared to traditional mixed plastic laminates
• 26% reduced water use compared to standard plastic packaging
• 70% less material needed overall, versus rigid packaging

Move further, to our compostable range, and the same switch could save the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of a car driving 83,750 miles.

Less material in, less waste out. A flexible pouch simply carries less plastic by weight than the rigid container it replaces for the same volume of product.

Shipping, lower emissions. Flexible formats collapse flat and stack far more efficiently than rigid shapes, fewer, fuller shipments mean lower transport emissions and lower freight costs.

Lower resource demands in production. As the fossil fuel and water use figures above show, flexible manufacturing is measurably lighter on inputs than producing an equivalent rigid container.

The honest caveat: recyclability takes the right design. Flexible packaging is genuinely harder for councils to recycle than rigid plastic today, currently only around 17.6% of UK local authorities collect it kerbside, so most needs to be taken to larger stores and recycled alongside carrier bags. That’s changing with the rollout of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), but it’s why we build our recyclable range as monomaterial, a single polymer, typically polyethylene, which is one of the easiest plastics to recycle and is independently certified under the Independent Certification of Recyclability scheme. Mixed-material laminates are much harder to process; monomaterial isn’t.

But change is coming, flexible packaging will be moving to widely recyclable, from 1^st April 2030, which is a huge shift. You will be able to recyclable at curb side, not long now.

Rigid-to-flexible is the headline, but a genuine plastic reduction strategy has more than one lever:

• Recycled and bio-based content. Our recyclable range includes materials with up to 30% recycled plastic content from both pre- and post-consumer sources, plus a 30% bio-based option derived from sugarcane that eliminates polymer resins entirely.
• Compostable formats for dry goods. For products like tea, dry pet food, and snacks, our compostable range is built from kraft paper, a corn-starch heat-seal film, and a cellulose barrier film. It uses up to 95% less packaging material than rigid alternatives.
• Certified end-of-life, not just claims. Every structure we sell as recyclable or compostable is independently certified, not just labelled, home compostable packaging breaks down in under 26 weeks at ambient temperatures, industrial in as little as 12 weeks at 60°C.
• Right format for the product. Liquids need a recyclable structure (compostable material can’t hold them); dry goods can go fully compostable. Getting this match right avoids contamination and keeps the packaging genuinely usable at end of life.

If you’re planning packaging changes for 2026, start by auditing your current rigid formats and identifying which could move to flexible without compromising product protection or shelf presence. Across pet food, health & sports nutrition, food, lawn & garden, and building & chemical, we’ve found that list is usually longer than brands expect.

Reducing plastic doesn’t mean reinventing your whole packaging strategy overnight, often it starts with asking whether a product needs to be rigid at all, and choosing the right material once you’ve made that switch.

Want to talk through what a rigid-to-flexible switch could look like for your product line? Get in touch with the Tyler Packaging team.