'Personal conundrum' leads plastic bag executive to write sustainability book

The plastic bag business is very important in Trent Romer's life.

He's a third-generation owner of Clear View Bag Co. in Albany, N.Y., and talks enthusiastically about his family's history building the firm and the 70 employees working there.

But he had a problem. Society's concerns about plastics waste in the environment were really getting to him, and he felt sympathetic.

"I did not feel great about the product we made," he said. "I had my own personal conundrum."

That dissonance launched him on a path to find different business models, one that led him write a newly published book, Finding Sustainability: The Personal and Professional Journey of a Plastic Bag Manufacturer.

In the book, Romer writes about being torn. There's the positive role of plastics in daily life, like in food protection and medical devices, and the jobs it provides at his company.

But Romer, who's been in the bag business more than 25 years, said he was weighing that against the environmental problems from waste and our "linear mindset focused on convenience."

He said he was thinking a lot about it when he saw the iconic 2018 National Geographic magazine cover, with a plastic bag shaped like an iceberg, as part of its "Planet or Plastic?" initiative.

"The National Geographic June 2018 cover really was almost a surreal moment for me, it confirmed everything that I kind of thought and it really pushed me to say, 'It's time to do something,' " he said in an interview with Plastics News.

His book details an ongoing journey to try to adapt the company's mission, while protecting the livelihoods of employees and their families.

Romer spelled it out at the beginning of his introductory chapter.

"What if the foundation of your family business were threatened by something out of your control?" he wrote. "What if the reason were actually one with which you fundamentally agreed?"

He describes how a lifetime of camping, hiking and canoeing trips was a big personal motivator to take the steps, and he returns to outdoor and nature metaphors throughout the 126-page book.

Romer said his work is not meant to provide a definitive answer for anybody.

"I'm no scientist, but I feel like I try to bridge that gap between what the science and the facts are saying and what we can do in everyday life as individuals and small-business owners," he said. "I try to stay in my lane."

What emerges is a picture of a work in progress at one small company.

Some of the details will be familiar to anybody in the spider web of the packaging supply chain. He talks about searching out suppliers of alternative materials like recycled-content plastics or bio-based or compostable resins to move away from fossil fuel materials.

He related taking a scouting mission to a supermarket in Amsterdam with plastic-free aisles on a side trip from a conference to see if it would be a "glimpse into the future."

There, he said he found it "alarming" to see "Plastic Free" logos. And he said he was intrigued by package labels that included information on greenhouse gas emissions, like an environmental version of nutritional labeling, to give consumers more buying information.

He has sections on attending conferences with other executives, joining the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and taking a deep dive into the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastics Economy project, trying to find guidance relevant to his small company so they could start taking steps.

"We're a 70-person company; we qualify as a small manufacturer," Romer said. "For the longest time I felt like, 'What are we going to do?'"

His book relates some common sales moments, like getting a cold slap from the market when Clear View first brought its new recycled resins and compostable materials to the PackExpo trade show in Chicago and saw clearly that customers wouldn't accept higher prices or trade-offs in performance.

Today, only about 5 percent of sales are what the company terms sustainable materials, but about 20 percent of inquiries seek quotes for them, which Romer says shows increasing awareness and interest.

"In terms of actually selling more and more sustainable materials to the marketplace, it's been a slow boat, but we certainly have seen increases," he said. "A few of the major brands we are dealing with, we are now stocking a few different raw materials for them."

The journey has also had technical challenges, like attempting to use more sustainable inks but finding they didn't perform as well on some frozen food packaging. Or working through processing challenges for compostable resins in resealable plastic bags.

In the book, he said it took 17 months from launching the green initiative to getting the first sizable order of plastic bags with recycled content resin.

But he described it as a "fleeting moment" because such business remains a small percentage of sales.

"This is the hardest part," he wrote. "Most sustainable options have limitations, which our clients struggle to overcome. Low client literacy on potential options, lack of availability of specific items and higher costs all give us a high mountain to climb."

Recycled resin remains more expensive than virgin for the company, he said.

Changes within the company, however, have been much easier to implement, like meeting a 25 percent waste reduction goal in the first year, 2019, as well as reducing material purchases and getting employees to understand the switch in thinking.

"Internally I would say it's been an overwhelming success," he said.

Romer said the company doesn't want to flood employees with too many new initiatives, but it's working on a 99 percent landfill diversion program and exploring solar power.

And he said he continues to educate himself. He recently finished a training program from The Climate Reality Project, founded by former Vice President Al Gore, that he said puts the environmental issues in a social context.

"Some of that program really emphasizes the social piece of this, where a lot of these environmental effects that are going on most acutely affect those who have the least to do with it and are the most vulnerable," Romer said.

But he said Clear View also has to stay focused on its immediate business. He sees the pandemic as at least temporarily reducing interest in sustainability.

"This COVID world has not helped," Romer said. "At the first sign of COVID, sustainability went out the window. Survival just overwhelmed us all. That's a powerful force, the survival instinct.

"How do we overcome that, or how do we balance that with sort of long-termism?" he said.

Romer said he and the firm's other co-owner, his brother Todd, also balance each other out on the green initiative.

He hints at it in the book and in an interview expands on it.

"There's no groupthink between my brother and I; we tend to come at things all the time," Romer said, laughing. "We come together on things and have some candid conversations before we move forward. I think [Todd's] thing for me was, 'Let's make sure this is grounded in good business initiatives.'

"We always put our family and the business in front of any kind of ego-driven ideas we have," Romer said.

While Romer's book refers to an "anti-plastic environmental narrative" in society, he said the impact on Clear View's business from single-use bag bans and attention on ocean plastic has been negligible.

In part, he said, that's because the company focuses more on customized, lower-volume bag orders and specialty products.

And part of that he attributes to the pandemic and how that's boosted demand for single-use packaging.

"The anti-plastic narrative generally has not [hurt business]," he said. "[In the pandemic] bread bags and ice bags and carrots and celery, all those things have gone way up for us. The second thing that's gone way up is medical packaging. … Those two things have really spiked."

But he said he still wonders if COVID-19 merely hit pause on what's coming, since sustainability discussions were "hugely interrupted" by the pandemic.

He wants to position Clear View for a market that he sees seeking out the lowest environmental impacts in its packaging, and he wrote that plastic has strengths in phases of the life cycle and is underappreciated.

"I don't care if it's plastic or paper or metal or whatever; you want the material with the least emissions at the beginning and the most circularity at the end," he said. "What we want is to make packaging that is made from renewable or existing [recycled] sources and then has a path to circularity at the end of life."

He said he hopes the book sparks conversations, and he said after starting the green initiatives, he has fewer of the conflicted feelings that launched the effort.

"I do feel less conflicted, although you still feel a little bit vulnerable because you're just this tiny link in this big chain," Romer said. "You just can only do so much. But when you do your part and you start to talk, you realize there's a lot of people that feel the same way."