A practical guide for packaging companies navigating growing sustainability expectations on both sides of the Atlantic.
If you supply packaging, there is a reasonable chance a sustainability questionnaire is already sitting in one of your inboxes. If not, the odds are it will land in the next twelve months. Large buyers in food and beverage, personal care, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods and industrial manufacturing are tightening what they expect from the companies they buy from, and EcoVadis has become the platform most of them use to measure it.
Packaging sits in an awkward spot. Your sector is already under a magnifying glass for materials, recyclability and emissions. Your customers are under their own pressure from regulators, investors and consumers, and that pressure rolls downhill. Packaging is usually one of the first places it lands.
The good news is that most packaging companies are already doing more of the right things than they realise. The less good news is that EcoVadis only scores what you can evidence. Here are five things worth knowing before the request arrives.
1. The request is coming from your customers, not regulators
This is the point most packaging companies get wrong at first. They wait for a law to force their hand. In reality, the pressure is commercial, and it is arriving sooner than legislation would.
Large consumer goods brands, retailers and industrial buyers are increasingly using EcoVadis to screen and monitor their supply base. For some, a minimum score is now a condition of tendering, renewing or retaining contracts. For others it is a soft expectation today and a hard threshold in twelve months. Either way, the decision about whether your company participates is being made by procurement teams at your customers, not by policymakers.
There is also a transatlantic dimension worth understanding. European regulation, in particular the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, applies to large European companies, but those companies are passing the requirement down through their supply chains. That means US packaging suppliers selling into European-owned brands, and UK packaging suppliers selling into US-headquartered retailers, are often being asked for sustainability evidence well before their own domestic regulation would require it. "We will wait and see" is rarely an option, because the party setting the timeline is sitting on the buy side of the relationship.
2. You are probably already doing most of this. You just have not written it down.
The single biggest misconception about EcoVadis is that it is a test of whether you are a sustainable
business. It is not. It is a test of whether you can evidence that you are a sustainable business.
Packaging companies tend to be long-established, operationally mature and pragmatic. The kind of activity EcoVadis wants to see, things like LED lighting retrofits, waste reduction schemes, recycled content, supplier codes of conduct, health and safety protocols, anti-bribery procedures, staff training, is often already happening. It is just happening informally. The policy lives in someone's head, or in an email chain, or in a procedure that was drafted years ago for a different purpose and never updated.
EcoVadis scores what is written down, dated, signed off and made public where appropriate. Two companies can be doing exactly the same thing on the ground and score very differently, purely because one has documented it and one has not. The gap between a good score and a poor one is very often a documentation gap rather than a performance gap. That is a much easier problem to solve than the one most companies think they are facing.
3. The Environment theme is where packaging companies win or lose
EcoVadis assesses across four themes: Environment, Labour and Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement. All four carry weight, but the weightings are industry-specific, and for packaging businesses the Environment theme is almost always the heaviest.
That makes sense. Your customers are buying your product partly because of what it is made from, how it is produced, and what happens to it at end of life. Expect EcoVadis to look closely at energy and emissions data, waste and material flows, water where relevant, product-level environmental impact, and evidence of a real environmental management system rather than a one-page statement.
This also means the Environment theme is where the biggest score movements are available. Companies that invest time in proper carbon accounting, credible targets, documented recycling and waste processes, and clear evidence of materials innovation will generally see that effort reflected in their rating. Companies that rely on general statements of intent will not.
The other three themes still matter. Poor performance on labour, ethics or sustainable procurement will drag your overall score down regardless of how strong your Environment score is. But the first serious conversation a packaging company should have about EcoVadis is an environmental one.
4. Bronze is becoming the floor, not the goal
EcoVadis awards medals based on where your overall score sits in its rated population. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum correspond to the top 35%, 15%, 5% and 1% respectively, with a Committed Badge below medal level for companies that have completed an assessment without yet crossing the Bronze threshold.
For a long time, achieving any medal was considered a strong result. That is shifting. A growing number of buyers now specify a minimum score rather than a minimum medal, and the minimums are rising. What counted as a strong first submission two or three years ago increasingly looks like a baseline today.
There are two implications worth taking seriously. The first is that aiming only at Bronze, while sensible as a first submission under time pressure, leaves you exposed if a customer raises their threshold at your next assessment cycle. The second is that the companies making the most of EcoVadis are treating it as a performance framework rather than a pass-or-fail exam: using the scorecard feedback to prioritise improvements, reassessing annually, and moving up the medal tiers over several years.
5. Your score is a relationship, not a certificate
An EcoVadis scorecard is valid for twelve months. That phrasing matters, because it reveals how the platform is designed to work. This is not an annual accreditation you tick off and forget. It is a continuously updated view of your sustainability performance that your customers can see, compare against peers and act on.
For packaging businesses, that changes the strategic calculation. A strong score is worth more than the sum of the contracts it protects. It becomes something you can reference in tenders, on your website, in sales conversations and in supplier onboarding with your own subcontractors. It also sets the starting point for your next assessment, which is why companies that treat the first submission as a long-term foundation, rather than a one-off compliance exercise, tend to see the biggest score improvements over time.
The inverse is also true. A weak score, or a scorecard that has quietly expired without a reassessment, is visible to the same audiences. Silence is not neutral in this system.
A brief real-world example
One of our recent clients, Castle Industrial Supplies, faced exactly the situation described above. A key customer required an EcoVadis assessment within a tight window. Castle already had strong operational foundations in place, from workforce wellbeing to responsible sourcing, but much of it was embedded in day-to-day practice rather than documented in the form EcoVadis could score.
Working together, we conducted a rapid gap analysis, collated and strengthened the evidence for existing good practice, created the additional reports, procedures and governance documents the methodology expects, and built in measurable targets to support year-on-year improvement. The outcome was a first-time Bronze Medal delivered under time pressure, with a structured foundation in place to move up in future cycles.
The point of the example is not the medal. It is the gap between what the business was already doing and what it was able to prove it was doing. That gap is where most packaging companies sit when their first EcoVadis request lands. You can read the full case study here.
Where to start
If an EcoVadis request is on the horizon, three things are worth doing now, regardless of whether you plan to run the process in-house or with support.
First, take an honest look at what you are already doing, and how much of it is documented in a form someone outside the business could audit. That alone will tell you whether your challenge is a documentation exercise or a performance one, and the two require very different timelines.
Second, get a realistic view of your customers' expectations. A phone call to your key accounts, asking where EcoVadis sits in their supplier requirements and what score they are working to, is usually more useful than any amount of internal speculation.
Third, treat the first submission as the foundation for the next three, not as a single deliverable. The companies that get the most value from EcoVadis are the ones that build the evidence base properly the first time, so each subsequent cycle is an improvement exercise rather than a fresh start.
If you would like a second opinion on where your business currently sits, or a conversation about what a well-structured first submission actually looks like in practice, we are happy to help. transformacy is an EcoVadis Accredited Training Partner, and packaging businesses are one of the sectors we work with most often.
Or, if you would prefer to read first, our free EcoVadis guide walks through the assessment in more detail.