Assessing Adoption Barriers of Sustainable Packaging in Egypt

Sustainable packaging has become an essential part of business decisions and corporate directions. With the rise of environmental damages due to improper waste management and unsustainable practices, businesses have a major responsibility to analyze their products’ life cycles and redesign them with sustainability in mind. Applying sustainable packaging could save companies large amounts of resources, therefore cutting costs, while also achieving the legal and social duty as a corporation towards society and the environment. Many developing countries, with specific focus on Egypt, have recently focused on legislative and corporate decisions in order to encourage more sustainable practices. Egypt’s new Waste Management Law 202 of 2020, the first of its kind, was created to regulate the waste management industry by creating a new regulatory authority to oversee proper waste management and recycling practices and develop a national strategy to improve waste disposal and recycling. This enabled stricter initiatives to take place, “Post-Consumer Plastic Waste Pact” developed by the Ministry of Environment in early 2021 as a leading initiative, where eight Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCGs) pledged commitment to enhancing their product lifecycle management by incorporating plastic waste recollection and recycling efforts; creating a circular economy for plastics. However, given the current supply chain cycle and the packaging ecosystem, the motivation to shift to more sustainable practices needs to be deeply analyzed with a closer look at the barriers to incorporate this change within the industry. This study aims at assessing the implementability of sustainable packaging in Egypt by evaluating the packaging landscape, ecosystem and barriers of adoption within the FMCGs and externally. The study incorporates technology adoption theories with the barriers of adoption and uses those as a baseline for the multi-case analysis of eight FMCG manufacturers in Egypt to evaluate their sustainable packaging practices and the organizational value achieved from their adoptions. The paper develops a stakeholder relationship matrix for the sustainable packaging ecosystem along with a barriers relationship matrix outlining their mitigation measures. The relationship matrices can form a basis for developing countries with similar circumstances to understand how stakeholders affect the strategic interests of FMCG firms and how their interdependence can be maximized in order to achieve sustainable business practices. With a growth in sustainability priorities in developing countries and worldwide, the explorative study unfolds future research opportunities