Do US consumers care about sustainable packaging in 2025?

The post-2020 era has been one of enormous upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed consumer behavior and preferences, and uncertainty and disruption have continued to be major features of the global economy ever since. For example, the United States has experienced its highest rate of inflation in decades, there is global geopolitical uncertainty, and many countries have been roiled by the energy crisis and volatile financial markets.

The result, as recent McKinsey research indicates, may be a stalling of US consumer confidence, with spending intentions down across several discretionary categories. How have these shifts, as well as the rising cost of living, affected consumer attitudes and sentiments about sustainable packaging? Do consumers still care about environmental issues?

To answer these questions, we launched in March 2025 another round of our comprehensive survey exploring consumers’ attitudes toward sustainable packaging. We have conducted this research globally with tens of thousands of consumers since 2020, and this round of the survey encompasses eleven countries across four continents, including 1,000 consumers in the United States. Over the coming months, we will be sharing the insights learned, starting here with the US consumers.

The survey revealed five key findings for US consumers: Two relate to the most important factors overall for consumers when they make purchases and consider packaging, and the remaining three detail consumer attitudes toward sustainability.

First, consumers consistently rank the quality, price, and convenience of products as more important than the environmental impact of products. The importance of price and quality, in particular, have increased substantially since 2020, with more than 70 percent of respondents now saying they are “very important” or “somewhat important” to their purchasing decisions across categories. While about a third of consumers said the same of environmental factors, value for money is clearly more top of mind for consumers in 2025.

Second, when thinking about packaging overall, US consumers are most—and increasingly—concerned with food safety and shelf life, reflecting a focus on reduced food waste and cost, with broader environmental impact less of a concern. These findings are broadly consistent with previous survey rounds, with the importance of most factors beyond the top two remaining more or less unchanged. The exception is packaging appearance, which has fallen in importance since 2020, in line with a broader shift toward online shopping and the increased importance consumers place on convenience and access.

Moving into consumer attitudes toward sustainability, the third key finding is the importance of a product’s recyclability. It is the most important characteristic for US consumers when considering the sustainability of packaging, though a significant portion is also concerned with the level of recycled content and reusability. Fourth, when asked to rank types of packaging based on their level of sustainability, US consumers surveyed perceive glass to be the most sustainable, followed by paper and metal. This is consistent with the importance of recyclability to US consumers: Glass, metal, and paper are the packaging types with the highest levels of recycling rates and recycled content in the United States. Finally, US consumers believe that it is brand owners and packaging producers, not retailers or consumers themselves, that should be held responsible for sustainability in packaging.

Overall, while the proportion of US consumers that care about sustainability has not fallen, other factors may now be more important. All companies in the packaging value chain will need to tailor their strategies to respond to the nuanced, evolving consumer views on sustainable packaging. Companies looking to build market share should consider action in four areas: understanding the granularity of consumer behavior, engaging the full packaging value chain, designing packaging to meet the full set of consumer needs and preferences, and prioritizing consumer education.

Top-of-mind packaging and product considerations for US consumers

Diving deeper into the five main survey findings, responses from US consumers point to how much—and in what ways—they value packaging sustainability.

1. Consumers consistently rank the quality, price, and convenience of products as more important than their environmental impact

As in the 2020 and 2023 surveys, consumers consistently rank environmental factors as less important than many other concerns in determining their purchasing behavior (Exhibit 1). Price, quality, and convenience are the most important buying criteria for products for US consumers, likely driven at least in part by increased cost consciousness due to recent inflation as well as changing lifestyles and preferences that lead consumers to place a growing premium on ease of access and consumption.

While about a third of consumers ranked environmental factors as “very important” or “somewhat important” to their purchasing decisions across categories, this amount is significantly lower than the proportion of those who said the same for price, quality, and convenience. This is consistent with our previous surveys, though other indications from the market suggest that environmental impact does indeed affect purchasing decisions for some consumers; our joint study with NielsenIQ in 2023, for example, showed that over the five preceding years, products with clear environmental, social, and governance claims had grown eight percentage points faster than those that did not make such claims.

The importance of other factors varies by purchase category. Brand is a very important factor for beverages, pet food, and personal hygiene and beauty purchases. As in 2023, name brands may be important for consumers in these categories because they serve as a proxy for product quality and price.

2. In packaging, US consumers remain most concerned about food safety and shelf life and least concerned about packaging appearance

Looking deeper into what US consumers expect from product packaging, this survey round and comparisons with 2020 and 2023 produce a number of insights (Exhibit 2):

• Food safety and shelf life remain the most important characteristics. The “nonnegotiable” nature of these two factors may be linked to the salience of quality and price in overall purchasing decisions. A long shelf life, for example, also minimizes waste and prevents additional costs.
• Ease of use, label information, and durability also consistently rank high. It may be that these factors, while important, are not top of mind for consumers, because they are assumed to be standard—that is, consumers assume that packaging will be durable and will provide the information they need. There has been an increase in the importance of label information since 2023, perhaps reflecting growing consumer interest in and education about health and wellness. Consumers may also use labels to support choices based on quality and price, with package labels containing additional information becoming more common throughout this period as technology has increased the richness of information available to consumers.
• Environmental impact, while not a top-five factor for consumers, has bounced to pre-COVID-19 levels of importance for consumers. In 2025, 44 percent of consumers said that environmental impact is “extremely important” or “very important” to them, a return to 2020 levels after a slight dip in 2023. The gap between the top five factors and the rest has grown: The proportion of consumers considering environmental impact as at least “very important” is now 17 percentage points lower than the proportion that says the same of durability, which is ranked as the fifth-most-important factor.
• Consumers ranked packaging appearance as the least important factor. The importance of packaging appearance has fallen significantly since 2020, but it has recovered since 2023. One important factor here is likely the continued rise of online shopping, which reduces the salience of appearance in the purchasing decision.

3. Recyclability is the most important factor for US consumers when considering the sustainability of packaging

Recyclability is the top factor for US consumers when they think about packaging sustainability: 77 percent consider it “extremely important” or “very important” (Exhibit 3). Nonrecycable packaging can be defined as having no secondary life beyond its current use case. Today, much of the packaging produced cannot be recycled in existing recycling systems, contributing to a situation in which only a small portion of all packaging enters any kind of “circular economy.” This is especially true for multimaterial packaging, which poses a significant and unresolved challenge in recycling today.

Beyond recyclability, US consumers deem four other factors—recycled content, compostability, reusability, and the volume of material—roughly equal in importance when considering packaging sustainability. CO₂ impact and whether packaging is bio-based are less important on average. It may be that differing levels of consumer familiarity with these terms and concepts help explain these results; consumers may view recyclability and recycled content as solutions to familiar problems such as littering, pollution, and landfills, while they may be less familiar with the advantages of bio-based products.

These preferences can have important implications for brand decisions on how to design and position product packaging. Providing and emphasizing solutions that are circular (easy for the consumer to see as recyclable) can provide immediate sustainability legitimacy, while solutions that are strong on other dimensions (such as CO₂ impact) require either concerted consumer education or targeting toward those subgroups that view these dimensions as more important. This survey round, for example, found that 76 percent of high-income women in the Northeastern United States see CO₂ impact as “very important” or “extremely important,” which means that packaging with a low CO₂ footprint may be a strategic choice for products aimed at this demographic.

4. US consumers perceive glass- and paper-based packaging to be the most sustainable

US consumers perceive glass packaging to be the most sustainable and different forms of plastic packaging to be the least sustainable (Exhibit 4). Paper and cardboard packaging are ranked as the second-most sustainable, though liquid cartons—despite being paper-based—are ranked in the middle, alongside metal- and aluminum-based packaging.

This ranking of packaging substrates is largely consistent with what the survey revealed as the factors most important to US consumers when considering the sustainability of packaging. The substrates most closely tied to recyclability (that is, glass, paper, and metal) are viewed most favorably, while those that are considered to be more difficult to recycle—such as multimaterials (as in liquid cartons and laminated packaging)—are viewed less favorably.

Consumers also seem to distinguish technical recyclability from actual recyclability. For example, although polyethylene terephthalate (PET) can be closed-loop recycled, it is still viewed as relatively less sustainable than metal cans and glass bottles. The relatively low sustainability rank of PET in the United States is not reflected in other countries studied in this survey such as Germany and Sweden. This discrepancy could be due to consumers’ understanding of what happens to PET bottles after use: The United States has a bottle collection rate of 33 percent, compared with rates of more than 90 percent and 88 percent in Germany and Sweden, respectively. This difference in recycling practices across countries underscores the value of matching packaging to the local market’s ability to collect and process the material used.

5. US consumers believe brand owners and packaging producers should be held responsible for sustainability in packaging

Our 2025 survey also asked consumers who they see as most responsible for sustainability in packaging (Exhibit 5). Almost 70 percent of US consumers believe that either brand owners or packaging producers should be held responsible, with just 10 percent seeing themselves as principally responsible. Notably, however, less than 10 percent of the US consumers in our survey were able to name a single packaging company when asked.

One way to interpret this could be that consumers do not want to shoulder the perceived burden of choosing the “correct” packaging option, potentially paying a premium for their choice, and following disposal instructions. It may be that consumers perceive brand owners as large material users and generators while viewing packaging producers as having most control over packaging options. The consumer perceptions would explain why these two groups are held most responsible for packaging sustainability.

Winning in sustainable packaging in 2025

While the packaging industry has historically been growing faster than GDP, there are indications that market growth may be slowing as consumer confidence shows signs of stalling. As a result, the industry should focus on making the most of existing and emerging growth opportunities. While improving packaging sustainability will not be the only answer, given our finding that sustainability is not the most important purchasing criterion for US consumers, it is not an area that the industry should neglect; we have already seen that products with clear environmental claims outgrow their peers.

Given the current uncertainties and diverging consumer views, there is no single solution to winning in sustainable packaging. To find and implement the right solution in their specific context, companies within the packaging industry should consider action across four areas:

1. Understand consumer behavior and preferences in a granular way. Results from this and earlier surveys indicate that different segments of US consumers have different views on packaging sustainability, as well as differing levels of willingness to pay. Before making any decisions, packaging companies will need to understand, on a granular level, the preferences of the specific consumer groups that buy their products, how these consumers buy and use the products, and how the current packaging is disposed of. Companies that make assumptions about consumer preferences in their packaging design labs likely incur a significantly larger risk of market failure. Optimal decisions for packaging may differ by product line and region, and this variance could justify more sector-specific tailoring of packaging than has previously been the industry standard.
2. Engage the full packaging value chain from the beginning. Packaging sustainability decisions may affect everything from supply chain logistics to branding and marketing. As a result, companies should consider consumer preferences for packaging sustainability at the start of any process to launch or update a product, not as an afterthought. Finding the right solution may be easier when companies take an incremental and experimental approach that involves brand owners and upstream raw materials suppliers.
3. Design packaging to meet the full set of consumer needs and preferences. While a significant subset of US consumers view sustainability considerations as important to their packaging choice, there are—as we have seen—other factors that may be more important. More broadly, and given the increased ease of accessing a broad range of high-quality products, consumers increasingly expect the products they purchase to meet their full range of needs and preferences—excelling in one or a few factors will not be enough. Packaging companies will therefore need to take a holistic approach toward packaging design, ensuring their packaging has clear sustainability credentials without sacrificing durability, food safety, shelf life, or convenience.
4. Make marketing and consumer education a priority. As our 2023 survey round found, consumers do not necessarily know what to expect from sustainability in packaging, and we have also seen that preferences vary across groups. While consumer preferences may be one factor that packaging companies consider when making their packaging decisions, other factors will likely include a context-specific calculation of environmental impact. As a result, packaging companies will need to market toward and educate brands and consumers to illustrate the sustainability benefits of their packaging choices, as well as develop broader strategic narratives for the sustainability factors that are most important in their market context. These efforts can also be an opportunity to highlight sustainability efforts to consumers as a brand differentiator.

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The current environment for sustainability in packaging is complex. Many US consumers do care about these issues, but most are increasingly concerned about price and less so about sustainability. Now, more than ever, the winning packaging companies will be those that can simultaneously meet the full range of consumer needs. Those that can offer a compelling sustainability narrative without sacrificing on price or quality will be well positioned to grow their market share and capture value.