The easiest way to identify a packaging company that is not actually sustainable is to follow the money. Companies that claim sustainability credentials while generating significant revenue from plastic poly mailers, polyurethane foams, and petrochemical packaging at scale are not sustainable businesses: they are businesses with a sustainability marketing budget. Greenwashing in packaging has real commercial consequences for the brands, retailers, and buyers whose own sustainability claims depend on what their suppliers are actually doing.
Jeremy D. Bower, founder of Givr Packaging, built his company specifically around the willingness to refuse business that contradicts that commitment. “If they’re not willing to give up a sale to support their mission, they’re not truly sustainable,” Bower states. “Follow the money. That’s the test.”
Engineering Removes the Shortcuts That Plastic Makes Easy
Bubble wrap is a lazy design solution. It works, is cheap, requires no engineering thought, and is made of plastic. Replacing it requires understanding why glass bottles break, where they are vulnerable in a distribution chain, and how to engineer a structural corrugated solution that provides equivalent protection without the petrochemical shortcut. That is not a marketing exercise. It is a materials science and engineering problem that most packaging companies are not equipped or motivated to solve.
Bower spent the early years of his career testing paper and corrugated materials as an engineer, developing a technical understanding of how these materials behave under the forces of distribution, humidity, compression, and impact. “That engineering background is probably what I would call my secret sauce,” Bower reflects. “We’ve pushed the boundaries of these materials; we know how far we can take any given material grade.”
Every customer that comes to Givr Packaging with a design challenge inherits 23 years of accumulated knowledge, including the lessons from every failure along the way. That depth is what makes sustainable design viable rather than theoretical, because sustainable materials do not behave like petrochemical materials, and the gap has to be closed through engineering, not marketing.
Turning Down Revenue Is the Actual Definition of Mission Alignment
Givr Packaging declines non-sustainable requests approximately once or twice per week. About half of those customers accept an alternative solution. The other half go elsewhere. Bower is untroubled by either outcome. When a customer recently requested a rigid box tray with a transparent plastic lid, the answer was no. No exception, no compromise, no revenue trade-off that would make the business look like every other packaging company that claims sustainability while accommodating whatever the customer asks for. “If we said, ‘Most of the time we’re sustainable, but sometimes we’re not; we’ll take your business because we want the money,’ that would be a complete betrayal of our values.” Bower states. “It would also just make us like one of the other guys.”
Every person at Givr understands and operates by that principle. The moral high ground Bower describes is the direct result of a company-wide practice of saying no to customers when requests conflict with core values, without exception. On the question of verifying customers’ own sustainability claims, Bower is candid. Givr is a supplier, not a compliance auditor. What can be controlled is the reputation that attracts already-aligned customers, and the consistent refusal to supply non-sustainable materials regardless of what the customer claims to stand for.
Sustainability claims that hold up are the ones backed by actions taken outside the supply chain for no commercial benefit. Givr calculates all fiber consumed in its operations and replaces it by planting trees outside the supply chain, funded from its own ledger, at no cost to the customer. Those trees will not be harvested for paper production. “That’s real impact,” Bower notes. “The oil company using solar to power its oil pumps is self-serving. We try to lean toward the other way.”
Regulation Is Reshaping the Economics, But Discipline Comes First
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation is emerging across multiple jurisdictions, placing end-of-life costs on manufacturers and penalizing plastic packaging more heavily than paper. In states like California and Oregon, that framework is already moving forward. More than 85% of corrugated is recycled, compared with roughly 7% of plastic, a circularity gap that EPR legislation is designed to price into the market. The financial disadvantage of sustainable options will narrow as those penalties become fixed costs on traditional alternatives.
But regulation does not substitute for the operational discipline that makes a company sustainably credible before any legislation requires it. The brands and buyers whose supply chains will hold up under regulatory scrutiny are the ones that built relationships with suppliers who were already saying no to the wrong business long before the penalties arrived.
Follow Jeremy D. Bower on LinkedIn or visit Givr Packaging for more insights on sustainable packaging design, materials engineering, and building the supply chain discipline that separates genuine sustainability from marketing language.
