P+PB President (CONT’D FROM PAGE 10) education and industry positioning,” Suzano said in the statement. “Running a successful large-scale media initia- tive would only have been possible as part of a collective industry group.” Sustainability became the focal point of P+PB’s mes- saging in 2021. “There are people who feel sustainability is something that the whole industry can talk about and it’s part of our DNA,” Hansan said. “But there are companies who feel like they can differentiate themselves on that with customers.” P+PB had a $20 million budget in 2025. Some com- panies paying into the program “felt like our budget just wasn’t enough to really do the job they wanted to see,” she said. “They felt like they needed to invest their mon- ey in other activities. And some people said, ‘Okay, this worked great, we want to move on to something else.’” “I have had people say to me, ‘maybe some of these sectors would be better if they did their own thing,’” Han- san said. But part of the purpose of combining paper and packaging in a mandatory program was that it was neces- sary to have a good funding base, she said. Suzano said there can still be value in communal mar- keting. But what shape that could take is not clear. “The USDA provided a regulated, established frame- work for the P&PB that allowed the board to represent the industry without violating any anti-trust or anti-competition
regulation,” the company said. “Future communal market- ing among competitors would need the same third-party support and structure.” Ads through P+PB’s “Papertarian” campaign will run on streaming TV through the end of September. And web- sites, including marketing and sales tool kits and other as- sets, will go dark at the end of October. Hansan said P+PB has floated some of its programs with other entities to potentially continue them. For exam- ple, Hansan noted the possibility of continuing the Box to Nature program, a consumer-focused residential recycling program that involves a special label on boxes, a prospect she said she discussed with the Fibre Box Association (FBA). FBA had no comment. Hansan said it could likely be a few years before the industry really notices potential impacts from the loss of P+PB’s consumer-facing marketing campaign. “It would probably be three, four, five years before you really felt the lack of presence of a campaign,” Hansan said. “But that’s really what our program was always meant to do, is to really reach that consumer who ultimately is driving what packaging customers who use paper packaging do.” She cautioned that some companies might be so fo- cused on messaging to their customers, that it comes at the expense of communicating with consumers. Mean- while, other packaging substrates are active in this area, she believes. “The plastics industry is very much talking to consumers,” she said.
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September 1, 2025
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