中文There was a time when a sustainability rating was something you mentioned if a customer asked. Now it arrives before the meeting does.
Flint Group Packaging Solutions has published its Full Year 2025 Sustainability Report, and the headline item is that it has retained its EcoVadis Gold rating for a second consecutive year. Underneath that is a fairly dense document covering greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy sourcing, water use, waste management, employee health and safety, and responsible business practices, all organised under the company’s PRISM framework.
On its own, that is a solid corporate announcement and nothing more. But look at the context and it becomes something more interesting: a supplier of inks and coatings is now being graded on operational governance by the same procurement machinery that grades its customers’ packaging.
Why a supplier’s rating lands on your desk
If you print labels or flexible packaging, you buy ink. If you buy ink from a large group, that group is almost certainly being asked for ESG data by the brands it serves — and those brands are being asked by retailers, and the retailers are being asked by regulators and by the capital markets.
The chain runs all the way down. Which means a printer’s ability to answer a brand’s sustainability questionnaire now depends, in part, on whether its ink supplier can answer one too.
This is the quiet reason EcoVadis Gold matters more than it sounds. EcoVadis assesses across environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. A Gold rating is not a marketing claim a company can write for itself. It is an external assessment with a methodology, an evidence requirement and a score. When a brand’s procurement team sees it, they are not reading a brochure. They are reading an input into their own risk model.
Flint has now held that rating two years running, which is the part that actually counts. Anyone can have a good year. Sustaining a score across assessment cycles, while integrating acquisitions and managing volatile energy costs, is harder.
What is in the report
The FY2025 document covers environmental performance, people and governance, with progress during 2025 and the priorities the company says it is still working on. Specifically: greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy sourcing, water use, waste management, employee health and safety, and responsible business practices. Detailed figures sit in the full report rather than the summary.
That list is unremarkable, and that is the point. Ten years ago a packaging supplier’s sustainability report was largely a collection of photographs of trees. The current generation is a set of measurements with baselines and targets, and the industry has become fluent enough to argue about them. That fluency is progress, even if it is boring progress.
The CEO’s framing
Pepyn Dinandt, CEO of Flint Group Packaging Solutions, describes sustainability as having always been deeply embedded in how the business operates and creates value for customers, and says the results reflect that commitment more clearly than ever. He points to the PRISM framework, references 2030 ambitions, and notes that the commitment has been externally recognised by organisations such as EcoVadis.
There is a line in his statement worth pausing on: the company remains focused on accelerating innovation to support a more sustainable future for the packaging industries, with thanks to employees, customers, suppliers and partners.
That is not just politeness. Ink and coating innovation is where a lot of packaging sustainability actually gets delivered or blocked. A mono-material structure only works if the coating lets it perform. A de-inking process only scales if the ink chemistry allows it. Recycled content targets only hold if the ink still behaves on a substrate with more variability than virgin material. The chemistry is upstream of almost every design decision a converter makes.
The sceptical read, which is fair
An external rating is not a guarantee. EcoVadis measures management systems and evidence, not outcomes in your specific plant. A Gold rating does not tell you whether the particular ink you buy has a lower carbon footprint than a competitor’s, and it does not tell you whether the company’s 2030 ambitions are achievable.
It also does not make the underlying tension go away. Inks and coatings are chemistry businesses that run on energy and solvents. The pathway to lower emissions usually involves reformulation, which involves requalification, which involves cost and time, and which competes for attention with the price pressure every converter is under.
So treat the report as a signal of management maturity rather than proof of environmental virtue. That is what it is.
What a printer should actually do with this
Three practical things.
First, if you are being asked for supply chain ESG data by a brand customer, ask your ink supplier for their latest assessment summary and any product-level documentation they hold. Companies that have gone through EcoVadis usually have structured answers ready. Companies that have not will send you a PDF with a leaf on it, and you will have learned something useful.
Second, use the rating in your own tenders. When you bid for work from a brand with public sustainability commitments, being able to name assessed suppliers is a genuine differentiator, and it costs you nothing but a phone call.
Third, do not confuse your supplier’s rating with your own performance. If a brand asks about the recyclability of your printed pack, the answer depends on substrate, ink, coating and structure together. A Gold-rated ink supplier does not make a multilayer laminate recyclable.
The direction of travel
The broader pattern is that sustainability credentials are migrating from the communications department into procurement, and from the brand into its supply chain. That migration is being driven by exactly the regulations now landing in Europe, the United States and India — the ones that put recyclability and recycled content on a statutory timetable.
In that world, an EcoVadis Gold retained for a second year is not a nice thing to have. It is table stakes for selling into the accounts that matter, and a company that loses it will find out quickly how much of its pipeline depended on it.
Flint has kept it. The interesting question for the rest of the supply base is how many of their competitors have not.
Source: Labels & Labeling — Flint Group retains EcoVadis Gold
