Consumers are weighing sustainability through a sharper lens of value as economic pressures reshape purchasing decisions. In today’s price-sensitive market, sustainability isn’t a standalone differentiator—it’s part of a broader equation where cost, performance and environmental impact must work together. This shift puts packaging at the center, challenging brands to deliver sustainable solutions that protect products, meet consumer expectations and maintain operational and financial efficiency.
Responding to Sustainability Demands in a Cost-Driven Economy
The last two years have reshaped how sustainability influences purchasing decisions. As financial strain increases, consumers are placing greater emphasis on value, while still factoring environmental impact into how they evaluate brands and packaging choices.
That shift is rooted in real economic strain. According to the 2025 Colliers Global Retail Trends report, 88% of U.S. consumers are concerned about their personal finances. Inflation, higher interest rates and rising everyday expenses are reshaping how households prioritize spending. At the same time, brands and retailers are facing rising costs across materials, labor, transportation and compliance, alongside growing ESG requirements.
These pressures show up most clearly for brands at the point of purchase. As private labels and lower-cost alternatives gain share, brands are being pushed to compete across a broader range of value tiers. This is already playing out in key categories. For example, mass market beauty sales grew 4% to $34.6 billion in the first half of 2025, outpacing prestige beauty's 2% growth to $16 billion.
In this environment, sustainability is no longer a standalone differentiator, it’s part of a broader value equation. It shapes perception, especially when it’s easy, familiar and aligned with price expectations.
That’s where packaging plays a critical role. As the first physical touchpoint, it has the ability to reinforce value, signal sustainability and support operational efficiency. This raises a central question: How do you deliver packaging that meets sustainability expectations while maintaining execution and financial efficiency?
Finding the Balance Between Price and Sustainability Expectations
By understanding how shoppers make value‑driven decisions, brands can advance sustainable innovation in ways that support protection, convenience and cost efficiency. Here are a few considerations to help your operation balance those expectations:
1. Start with Design
Right-sizing packages and shifting from rigid to flexible formats are often where brands unlock the biggest reductions in material use. Those gains aren’t coming from material swaps alone; they come from rethinking the overall design first. Starting with format and size improves efficiency across operations, while aligning with how consumers interpret sustainable design today.
This becomes especially important when evaluating material choices. While paper-based packaging offers the familiarity of curbside recyclability, it can carry a higher material cost than poly in certain applications. Right-sizing becomes a critical lever here. By optimizing packaging dimensions, a right-sized paper solution can become competitive with a non-optimized box using plastic packaging by reducing total material use, void fill and shipping costs by lowering DIM weight.
This matters in a price-sensitive environment. By minimizing excess space, brands can narrow cost gaps for alternative materials, while still delivering on consumer expectations for recyclability and sustainable design.
When that design thinking is made visible to consumers, it drives results. Clear signals, like “uses 30% less plastic compared to previous design" on packaging, help shoppers quickly understand sustainability benefits while reinforcing value. And the data backs this up: Products making sustainability-related claims averaged 28% cumulative growth over five years, compared to 20% for products that made no such claims.
2. Focus on Consumer Priorities
Consumers in every country rank recyclability as the most important factor when considering sustainable packaging. In fast-paced ecommerce and retail environments, where consumers face dozens of choices, and prioritize value, packaging that is clearly recyclable stands out. Importantly, this does not require a single recycling pathway for every application. As noted above, paper-based packaging enables curbside recyclability, whereas inflatable air cushioning designed for store drop-off recycling can help ecommerce operations optimize box space, improve throughput and manage cost.
Among U.S. and U.K. consumers, recycled content ranks as the second most important sustainability feature in packaging. But like other sustainability signals, it needs to be delivered in ways that preserve performance and value. In many applications, incorporating post-industrial recycled (PIR) content into poly mailers or void-fill solutions can reduce reliance on virgin material while maintaining performance and operational efficiency.
For brands looking to go a step further, solutions with higher levels of post-consumer recycled content (PCR) can help advance these goals. Pregis AirSpeed® Renew™ PCR portfolio is designed for store drop-off recycling and made with a minimum of 80% recycled content to support material efficiency, operational performance and consumer experience.
3. Scale Sustainable Innovation Across Value Tiers
As brands expand across premium, private-label and value-focused offerings, sustainable packaging can't be one-size-fits-all. The question is how to scale innovation across tiers while staying aligned with how consumers are shopping.
For premium products, packaging can reinforce perceived quality and justify higher price points through material innovation, elevated design and convenience features like resealability.
For value tiers, sustainability is most effective when it supports efficiency and cost containment. Automated systems, standardized formats and optimized protection strategies reduce packaging SKUs and enhance operational efficiencies.
This tiered approach allows brands to scale sustainability credibly across the full portfolio — matching innovation to how consumers are evaluating value.
What This Means Going Forward
Price is shaping more purchase decisions, but sustainability expectations remain. In both ecommerce and retail environments, packaging now plays a direct role in trust at delivery and at the shelf.
The brands and retailers that succeed will apply sustainability intentionally. They will prioritize sustainable attributes consumers value and focus on design strategies like right-sizing and material reduction to manage cost. Most importantly, they will ensure packaging continues to protect the product, because performance remains critical to both value creation and waste reduction.
