Sustainability at Elevate Packaging

How We Practice What We Preach

At Elevate Packaging, we have a firmly held consistent and sincere mission that is at the core of our purpose: Eliminate the need for landfills and the negative environmental impact caused by packaging. We focus on this by providing the world's most innovative sustainable packaging in every product category we offer. As the leading sustainability experts for over 20 years, we’ve consistently invested in research and development to create authentic compostable packaging solutions that reflect our vision to make composting mainstream.

Transparency underlines our responsibility to provide a straightforward and reliable sustainable packaging supply source for businesses who seek a trusted and honest expert to help them with an uninterrupted supply of authentic sustainable packaging.

Our founder established Elevate Packaging with the overarching goal to help businesses with easy and convenient access to the world's best sustainable packaging solutions. 

In the Elevate spirit of transparency and authenticity, leaders from our fulfillment team provide an insider's view on how Elevate Packaging internally practices what we preach.

Our Composting Obsession

You might be wondering why we’re obsessive about composting. Facts and figures about landfills and sustainable packaging can help explain:

The United States generates almost  300 million tons of municipal solid waste every year, that’s around 5 pounds of waste per person, per day. Half of that waste ends up in a landfill.

Landfills are sub-optimal for a few key reasons: they take up valuable space, don’t provide a good environment for effective decomposition of waste, and they release dangerous greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere (particularly methane, which is much more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas).  Landfills leach pollution into nearby communities that are often marginalized, reflecting a long-standing perpetuation of environmental injustice.

Landfills reflect a system-wide violation of fundamental ecological principles. One of the four laws of ecology espoused by renowned ecologist Barry Commoner in the 1970's speaks to this point: Everything must go somewhere. Those plastic bags you throw out don’t just vanish. They sit in a giant pile of waste, emitting pollutants into the air, land, and water without ever decomposing properly.

While Recycling can mitigate these effects to some extent, it has limitations. Recycling allows for materials such as paper, plastics, and glass, to be broken down and remade into new products. Unfortunately many materials can only be recycled a handful of times before they become too degraded to be useful.

Building infrastructure, collection and processing systems to further the recycling of petroleum-based plastics continues to support and perpetuate the production of the toxic plastic industry. Shifting this investment of time and resources toward compostable plastics may yield greater returns and must be considered.

Where Does Our Waste Go?

Further flaws in our recycling system entered mainstream consciousness in 2019 when news broke that China would no longer accept American plastics for recycling. This news put a spotlight on some ugly truths about recycling - that much of our waste wasn’t being recycled at all, and that the waste we thought was being recycled was instead causing further pollution across the world.

This is where composting enters the scene. Composting turns organic waste into a useful product - Compost! By composting our packaging we can lower emissions, reduce landfill waste, and the compost produced can re-enrich our planet’s soil.

We don't like the waste and negative impacts caused by packaging, but unfortunately it can’t always be avoided. If we can’t avoid packaging in some cases, we should at least be able to compost it! 

How Our Products Reflect Our Mission

Elevate Packaging focuses on offering the most sustainable packaging solutions possible on the planet. Our 100% compostable packaging solutions include blank and printed labels, hygienic liners, flexible pouches, shipping mailers, cellophane bags, and more.

One product line with a wide range of applications and uses is our compostable blank labels. They make sustainable packaging more accessible for small businesses.

As eCommerce Operations Manager Stephanie LaFontaine said, 

“Our blank labels on sheets are great because they are versatile in terms of functionality and in terms of reaching customers. Our blank labels on sheets are used as closures, logo stickers, item descriptions, and much more. They’re used by the smallest local business to larger nationally known companies. There are so many options and I love how easy, convenient, and economic they make compostable packaging to the consumer.”

Fulfillment Specialist Kevin Castillo highlighted our compostable cellophane products, which are made from FSC-certified wood-cellulose. As an avid foodie and chef, Kevin pointed out that compostable cellophane bags are especially useful for the food industry. The bags are vegan and non-GMO, while providing an affordable and easy sustainable option that supports regenerative organic practices. They meet FDA requirements for direct food contact and are perfect for packaging food, apparel, gifts, and much more.

Another key product is our compostable mailers. They bring the lightweight shipping benefit of traditional poly mailers without the petroleum-plastic waste. The 100% compostable mailers are made with industry-leading, durable, and water resistant certified home compostable film. 

How Elevate Packaging Ensures a Reliable Sustainable Supply Chain

We are proud to receive praise from customers that Elevate Packaging is a reliable sustainable packaging source that provides fast and easy service, delivered in an authentically sustainable manner.

When shipping orders we use our own 100% compostable mailers and shipping labels, reuse cardboard boxes and void fill, and select carbon neutral options to offset the environmental impact of our shipments whenever possible. Orders ship daily to ensure fast and efficient delivery to our customers, along with shipment tracing so they can monitor every step of their order up to their door.

Each of our compostable packaging products is itself packaged in compostable packaging. By taking the initiative to inform our customers how to properly dispose of our 100% compostable packaging products and associated shipping materials, we help ensure that our products are sustainable at all points of their life cycle.

A sustainable supply chain is critical to us. Our mission is to end landfills while re-enriching the soil to renew the planet. Compostable packaging is an excellent way to drive positive change, and raise awareness to the value of composting, which will ultimately help do away with landfills.

The alignment of what we champion and what we do resonates with our staff. As Kevin put it, 

“I just really enjoy the fact that Elevate really does believe in what it preaches. I love it. The company is very straightforward to its mission and it shows. Within the company’s internal operations, even the smallest details align with the mission. For instance, we don’t like to waste a lot of plastic. If we do, we make sure to recycle and compost any damaged products. Things like that stand out a lot.”

To some companies, sustainability is simply a trend or a fad that may be prioritized when it’s profitable and forgotten when it’s not.

We’ve lived and breathed sustainability since our founder started the company 20 years ago, driven by passion and deep-rooted commitment to eliminate packaging waste and improve the environment. It’s what we preach to our customers and it’s what we do, because it’s simply what we believe in.