There’s no shortage of sustainability conversation in our industry right now. Materials, certifications, carbon – pick your lane, there’s momentum. But when we step back and look at what’s actually showing up in the data and in day-to-day business decisions – the bigger issue is simpler, and a bit less comfortable:
Waste.
Not just what ends up in landfill, but how much we produce that was never really set up to succeed in the first place. Products designed for a moment, not for long-term use. Orders padded “just in case.” Materials combined in ways that make recovery unrealistic. Programs that end the minute the event does.
Elizabeth Wimbush
Director, Sustainability & Responsibility, PPAI
It’s not a new problem. It’s just one we’ve been able to ignore because the blame is all around. It can be spread across suppliers, distributors, clients and end users. There’s no single point of accountability, no clear line of sight to cost.
Well, that’s starting to change.
Through recent industry work, including PPAI’s double materiality assessment conducted with WAP Sustainability, waste consistently surfaced as one of the most significant impacts and risks facing the branded merchandise space. Not just environmentally, but operationally and financially.
While sustainability can still feel optional in some rooms, waste rarely is. It shows up as excess spend, inefficient programs and increasingly as regulatory exposure. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, already active in packaging and emerging in textiles, are designed to make the cost of waste visible. What has historically been externalized is moving onto balance sheets.
SOLUTION: View PPAI’s Guide To Reducing Waste In Packaging For Promotional Products
In other words, this is getting more concrete, whether we like it or not.
So where does that leave us?
There’s a tendency to jump straight to solutions framed as “circularity,” often presented as fully closed-loop systems. In theory, every output becomes an input. Nothing is wasted, and everything flows. Sounds lovely, right? In practice, especially at the scale and complexity of our industry, that’s not where most companies are operating and not where they need to start. The more useful way to think about circularity right now is not as an end state, but as a direction.
It’s a way of asking better questions earlier in the process.
- What happens to this product after it’s used?
- Is it designed for a single moment, or ongoing value?
- Are we creating unnecessary material complexity?
- Is there a simpler way to achieve the same goal?
None of those require a perfect system. But they do start to shift outcomes. The reality is, most products in our industry will still have an end of life. The goal isn’t to eliminate that entirely, but to reduce how much we’re sending to landfills and how quickly we get there. That’s where the opportunity sits.
We often talk about branded merch as a high-impact, tangible marketing channel. That’s still true. But impact cuts both ways. A product that is used repeatedly, kept and valued delivers a very different outcome – commercially and environmentally – than one that’s forgotten within days. This is where waste and effectiveness start to overlap. Reducing waste isn’t just about avoiding negative impact. It’s about getting more value from the same inputs (i.e., fewer items, used longer). We’re talking better alignment between product and purpose. This means programs designed with some level of afterlife in mind, not just distribution.
It also changes the conversation internally.
For sales teams, this isn’t about adding friction. It’s about asking sharper questions that lead to stronger recommendations. For operations and sourcing, it’s less about chasing ideal materials and more about reducing obvious inefficiencies. None of this requires a wholesale reinvention of how the industry operates. But it does require a shift in how decisions are made. They’ll need to be earlier and with a bit more intention.
And importantly, it requires being honest about where we are.
There’s still a gap between the theory of circularity and the reality of implementation. It’s messy. Definitions aren’t always consistent. Infrastructure isn’t evenly available. If we wait for it to be clean and standardized, we’ll be waiting a while. But in the meantime, progress is still possible.
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The companies that will navigate this well aren’t the ones with the most polished sustainability language. They’re the ones that start making incremental changes that reduce waste, whether or not they call it circularity. Because the direction is clear.
Regulation is tightening. Buyers are asking more specific questions. And the margin for inefficiency, whether environmental or operational, is shrinking.
Waste is becoming visible. The question isn’t whether the industry moves on this. It’s how intentionally we do it. Stay tuned to our PPAI.org/sustainability page, where soon you’ll see a resource for this. I’ll break it down into something more practical: a simple framework for how to approach waste reduction in merch, including where to start, how to think about trade-offs, and what “better” actually looks like in practice.
Not perfect. Not theoretical. Just usable.
