Circular Connector: Meet the 2022 Sustainable Packaging Innovation Award Winners
Walmart | October 27, 2022
Democratizing climate action has long been a part of how Walmart build programs such as Project Gigaton or the Circular Connector. Walmart collaborates with their partners for action, whether that’s to advance circular solutions, accelerate collaborations on renewable energy and zero waste or to enable more ambitious goal setting with Project Gigaton. Today, Walmart has joined the U.S. Plastics Pact at GreenBiz’s VERGE 2022 conference to announce the inaugural Sustainable Packaging Innovations Award winners.
Walmart donated the use of their recently launched Circular Connector platform to help capture innovations for these awards. The award winners cover four key categories: recycling, reuse, composting and reduction. And each winner spotlights either scalability, low-cost efficiencies or a customer-first proposal. Congratulations to the winners!
In April, they launched phase one of the Circular Connector, inviting innovators to submit their solutions for Walmart’s consideration. Solutions are screened against Walmart’s Sustainable Packaging goals and those that are aligned featured in the Connector. Last week, they made the Circulate Connector available for free to everyone via Walmart’s Sustainability Hub. And now, nearly 150 solutions are publicly available on the Circular Connector.
Scaling Packaging Innovations
Walmart's hope with making Circular Connector open source is that it propels companies to move faster to make design changes that will help create a circular economy for plastics, even their direct competitors. Sustainable packaging changes can’t happen in a silo and require lifecycle thinking. Today they still have packages that can cause confusion for customers: Is it recyclable? Compostable? Wait…I need to remove a label before it can be recycled? And on and on.
At their recent 2022 Milestone Sustainability Summit, Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said, “Our job is to design everything that we do in a way that the path of least resistance is the more sustainable or regenerative approach.” That is the mindset shift they are working on with their suppliers, NGO partners and others. Companies have the power to design packages that can help reduce the use of plastics and improve circularity.
I hope that all those like-minded companies who were silently asking how they could get their hands on a sustainable packaging solution will use Circular Connector to source their next innovation. Walmart cannot wait any longer. The ideas are here.