Sustainable Packaging at Speed: How Esko Is Building the Digital Backbone for a Low-Waste Future
In the latest episode of the FuturePrint Podcast, FuturePrint’s Elena Knight sat down with Geert De Proost, Director of Market Intelligence & Product Partnerships at Esko, to explore one of the industry’s central challenges: how to reduce waste and carbon impact across packaging and print workflows without compromising quality, profitability, or speed.
Esko has recently joined A Manifesto for More Sustainable Print as a founding partner, and the conversation revealed just how deeply the company is embedding sustainability into its tools, culture, and long-term vision for the packaging ecosystem.
Esko sits in the middle of the entire packaging value chain. Its portfolio includes tools for pre-press, colour, structural design, palletisation, workflow automation, and business process management. Sustainability has moved from voluntary initiative to mandatory compliance. With legislation such as the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regimes, environmental metrics are no longer a side deck of KPIs; they are tied directly to cost and licence to operate. For Geert, sustainability is inseparable from speed and accuracy. Waste occurs when decisions are made with incomplete data, when artwork iterations multiply unnecessarily, or when packaging isn’t optimised for logistics. Those inefficiencies cost time and money and usually increase environmental footprint.
That change is reshaping the conversations Esko has with customers. Instead of broad questions about ‘being greener’, brand and converter teams want to understand what the law will require, how much non-compliance could cost, and which design or workflow choices move the dial on recyclability, material efficiency and carbon.
Much of Esko’s sustainability story sits in parts of the process that rarely make headlines. De Proost highlighted three in particular:
First is logistics driven case sizing: Packaging is often over-engineered, with outer cases that ship more air than product. Esko’s structural design and palletisation software helps brands redesign cases and pallet layouts so they use less fibre and achieve better truck fill. That tends to cut both emissions and freight cost.
Second is print efficiency: Here the focus is on planning, colour management and digital workflow that reduce make-ready waste, errors and reprints. Sequential analogue processes are still common, and they tend to hide waste in approvals, remakes and changeovers. Better planning and colour control can remove a surprising amount of that. Esko’s flexo hardware and software products also contribute here by reducing hazardous chemicals such as mercury and solvents in plate processing. Its flexo screening technology lowers ink consumption on press and shortens makeready times, again combining economic and sustainability benefits at converter level.
Third is data sharing across the supply chain: Esko’s cloud platforms are being positioned as hubs for specifications, artwork and process data that sit today in email threads and spreadsheets. The goal is simple: make the right information visible to the right people early enough that they can act on it.
In practice, De Proost argued, a ‘sustainable workflow’ looks like this: Brand owners see a consolidated view of the environmental and regulatory implications of their packaging choices. Converters collect and analyse their own process data so they can track scrap, energy and carbon, and then use that information to refine both design and production.
Esko’s decision to back the Sustainable Print Manifesto is an extension of that work rather than a branding exercise. The manifesto’s nine principles deal in behaviour: design for purpose, choose better materials and inks, produce only what is needed, use finishing sparingly, recycle operational waste, cut emissions from energy, and minimise water use. Asked which of the Manifesto’s nine principles resonates most, Geert chooses three:
Optimise designs for purpose
Esko’s structural design and palletisation tools have long helped brands create fit-for-purpose packaging. But today, logistics-first optimisation, avoiding ‘shipping air’, is becoming both an economic and regulatory requirement. Esko is now merging structural and palletisation tools, so pack design and logistics operate from the same intelligence.Improve print efficiency
Through colour management, expanded gamut, screening technologies, and intelligent planning, Esko can drastically reduce changeovers, makeready waste, ink usage and downtime. ‘Print efficiency,’ Geert says, ‘has always made economic sense - now it makes sustainability sense too.’Lead with data and transparency
With legislation increasingly demanding detailed product and packaging data, Esko has built a cloud-based platform that becomes a single source of truth, a versioned, shareable asset hub for artwork files, pack data, sustainability attributes, and more. ‘Digital data is the biggest problem the industry faces and the biggest enabler of change.’ Geert hopes the industry will see Esko as the data backbone of sustainable packaging, the place where artwork, structural design, palletisation, colour, specification and sustainability attributes converge.
De Proost positioned the manifesto as a framework that fits on top of Esko’s own strategy. Internally, the company is working to reduce its own footprint and currently holds a silver EcoVadis score. Externally, it is embedding sustainability checks into product development so that new software and hardware are assessed not only on performance and cost, but also on environmental impact.
That logic mirrors the manifesto’s ambition. Rather than invent a new standard, it gives companies a shared reference point they can apply alongside existing regulations and certifications.
The discussion around logistics made clear that sustainability needs to be present at the point of decision, not in a report months later. De Proost mentioned Esko’s partnership with CarbonQuota, which brings carbon footprint data directly into palletisation and packaging decisions. The principle is straightforward. Instead of optimising a pallet purely for cost or transport efficiency, brands can see the carbon implications of different combinations of materials, formats and layouts. The more interesting question is how they weigh those factors against each other.
De Proost was candid that this is not a simple optimisation problem. Economic viability, recyclability and carbon impact all matter, and the right choice is not always obvious. Over time, he expects artificial intelligence to help simulate and balance these trade-offs so that teams can explore options faster and defend decisions with data.
If there was one consistent frustration in the conversation, it was the state of data in the packaging supply chain. Brand teams prioritise lower EPI (external production and innovation) costs and faster artwork cycles. Converters struggle with scattered process data that is neither standardised nor analysed. Compared with other sectors, packaging still has significant ground to make up in digital transformation. Regulation is likely to force the issue. Initiatives such as Europe’s proposed digital product passport will require a level of traceability and data integration that many current systems cannot deliver.
Here, TraceGains, a fully owned Esko company, enters the picture. Operating under its own brand, TraceGains runs a networked platform used by food and beverage and CPG brands to manage ingredients, suppliers, specifications and compliance on a single, digital system. It connects thousands of supplier locations and hundreds of thousands of ingredients and products, with tools for specification management, regulatory documents and horizon scanning.
Esko and TraceGains have integrated their systems so that regulatory and specification data from TraceGains can flow directly into Esko’s packaging and artwork workflows, enabling full data transparency between both platforms. In practice, that means a formulation change, regulatory update or supplier issue can automatically trigger a review of labels and packs, rather than relying on someone to spot a PDF in an inbox. It also helps ensure that packaging statements and sustainability claims are backed by verified data, not assumptions. The TraceGains link reinforces a theme running through the podcast: Sustainability in packaging is now a data and systems issue as much as a materials one.
For all the talk of AI and cloud platforms, De Proost kept returning to modest, practical changes. Reducing unnecessary changeovers, improving colour management, and planning print runs more intelligently all cut waste and cost at the same time. They do not demand a grand programme, but they do require better information and a willingness to adjust long-standing habits.
Culture is the harder challenge. Esko is trying to make sustainability a normal part of performance for every role rather than something owned by a specialist team. De Proost was clear that this shift is not only the result of tighter regulation. It reflects a broader change in mindset among customers and employees, who increasingly treat environmental impact and profitability as compatible objectives. De Proost argued that sustainability has to be embedded where value is created: in product and packaging design, in how data is captured and used, and in how companies choose partners. The Esko and TraceGains integration is one example of that logic. The Sustainable Print Manifesto is another, providing a common language for brands, converters, technology vendors and material suppliers.
Taken together, the conversation presented a sober but constructive view of packaging sustainability. Regulation is raising the floor. Data, workflow and design choices are where real gains will come from. No single company can deliver that on its own, which is precisely why collaboration around shared principles now matters more than ever.