For a long time, sustainability in our industry tended to start inside individual companies.
A distributor might experiment with recycled materials. A supplier might begin asking deeper questions about factory practices. A brand client might push for more transparency about where products come from.
Elizabeth Wimbush, CAS
Director, Sustainability & Responsibility, PPAI
Those efforts matter. They’re often where innovation begins. But they also reveal something important: Most sustainability challenges don’t sit neatly inside a single company’s walls.
Materials move through global supply chains. Products pass through multiple hands before reaching a client. Data about environmental impacts or sourcing practices often originates several partners upstream. In other words, the work – and the opportunity – lives across an ecosystem. Increasingly, business research is pointing to the conclusion that, when challenges span multiple organizations, progress tends to accelerate when companies collaborate rather than working in isolation.
Sustainability is one of those challenges.
Why Ecosystems Move Faster
Many sustainability initiatives stall not because companies lack interest, but because the work requires coordination across multiple players.
Take something as straightforward as understanding the environmental footprint of a product. A distributor may want that information for a client conversation, but the data often begins with the manufacturer or even the raw material supplier. A supplier might want to improve factory visibility, but that requires alignment with multiple brand partners. Even small changes such as reducing packaging often involve conversations between manufacturers, decorators, distributors and logistics providers.
In other words, sustainability often behaves less like a solo project and more like a group assignment. Fortunately in this case, everyone actually benefits if the group participates.
When companies collaborate in those spaces, a few useful things tend to happen.
First, innovation spreads more quickly. When one company tests a new approach – whether that’s recycled materials, different packaging or responsible sourcing practices – others can build on that learning instead of starting from scratch.
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Second, costs and risks are shared. Sustainability innovation can feel expensive or uncertain when one company is carrying the full burden. In collaborative efforts, the investment and experimentation are distributed across partners.
And third, better data emerges. Many of the insights companies need to make informed decisions only appear when information is pooled across an industry.
We saw this play out recently through the international carbon intensity research project PPAI conducted in partnership with ASI and several international associations. By pooling data from multiple regions and companies, the study was able to analyze the carbon impact of branded merch compared to other advertising channels.
The result was a first-of-its-kind dataset showing that merch is among the lowest carbon-impact advertising channels, a finding that likely wouldn’t have been possible if any one company had tried to tackle the research alone. (Not to mention the spreadsheet that would have broken someone’s laptop.)
It’s a good example of how ecosystem collaboration can unlock shared knowledge that benefits the entire industry.
Where Collaboration Already Happens
Our industry is actually well suited to this kind of ecosystem thinking. The business model is inherently collaborative. Suppliers, distributors, decorators and brand clients already work closely together to bring products to market. Extending that collaboration into sustainability and responsibility is a natural next step.
What that looks like can vary depending on where you sit in the supply chain.
For suppliers, collaboration might begin with engaging factory partners more deeply on environmental practices or exploring materials with lower environmental impact. It might also involve sharing insights with customers about what is realistically achievable in manufacturing and where improvements are already happening.
For distributors, collaboration often starts with conversations. That would mean asking suppliers thoughtful questions about materials and sourcing, helping clients understand product options with stronger sustainability attributes or sharing feedback from the market that encourages suppliers to keep innovating.
None of this requires a dedicated sustainability department or a large enterprise budget. In many cases, smaller companies have an advantage in that they can move quickly, build strong relationships with partners and test new ideas without navigating layers of internal approvals.
Sometimes progress simply starts with asking a slightly better question. Or at least one that doesn’t begin with “Do you have anything green?”
Where PPAI Fits In
As these ecosystem conversations grow, it’s natural to ask what role an industry association should play. PPAI’s job isn’t to run companies’ sustainability programs or tell members exactly how they should operate. Instead, our role is to help create the conditions where collaboration and progress become easier.
That often starts with bringing people together. Industry events, working groups and collaborative initiatives allow members to share ideas and explore solutions in spaces that are pre-competitive.
What Is Sustainability In Merch? | Visit PPAI.org/sustainability
It also means building shared resources. Industry research, benchmarking efforts and educational programs can help companies understand emerging expectations and identify practical starting points.
And sometimes the role is simply making sense of complexity. Sustainability conversations increasingly involve new regulations, evolving customer expectations and global supply chain dynamics. Helping members interpret those developments and understand what they might mean for our industry is an important part of the Association’s work.
What PPAI does not do is just as important. You may notice that the Association isn’t a certification body, an auditing organization or a product verification service. Those functions require specialized accreditation and technical oversight that sit outside the scope of a trade association. Creating another certification system might sound appealing, but the world of sustainability labels is already crowded enough to require its own flow chart.
Instead, the focus is on helping members navigate the credible frameworks and programs that already exist and understanding how they apply within the promotional products industry.
Moving Forward
Sustainability progress rarely happens in a straight line. More often, it builds through shared learning, experimentation and collaboration across partnerships.
The encouraging part is that much of that work is already underway across the branded merchandise industry. Companies are asking more thoughtful questions about sourcing, materials and product impacts. Suppliers and distributors are exploring new ideas together. And industry-level research is helping us understand our collective footprint in ways that weren’t possible before.
No single company will solve sustainability for this industry. But together, we can make it a lot easier to figure out.
