Wood as a packaging material offers a premium and sustainable alternative to plastics and other standard options. When sourced from sustainably-managed forests, it becomes an endlessly renewable resource. Far from killing trees, these forests are husbanded for long-term health, preserving biodiversity, protecting soil and water and ensuring a continuous supply. Moreover, they act as a carbon sink. In this respect, young forests are more effective than old forests, absorbing more CO₂ from the atmosphere. Programmes like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) (3) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) (4) offer a complete chain of custody from the forest to the final product, with complete transparency. On a human level, both foster family and community forests for collective impact, while it is also worth noting that the process of extraction is non-toxic.

In short, wood is a renewable, natural and safe material, but its characteristics make it particularly suited to beauty packaging. Besides adding a sensory dimension to a product, it is also a canvas for creativity. Wood can be converted into infinite geometric shapes, thanks to modern computer-numeric controlled (CNC) milling machines. A host of decoration techniques – from laser engraving to lacquering – can transform its aesthetics, highlighting the material’s natural origins or hiding it completely under an ultra-luxe finish. Its versatility makes it adaptable to any kind of brand image, making it suitable for mass market and prestige brands, and everyone in between.

There is a financial advantage to using wood, too. To start with, no moulds are required. CNC machines are simply programmed to produce a shape and wood-turning equipment creates cylindrical components like fragrance caps. This, in turn, allows faster prototyping and shortens overall development time. A reduced capital expenditure and a fast time to market combine to make wood economically viable for most brands.

When it comes to lowering the impact of beauty packaging, with wood, change does not have to be radical. Cosmetics companies can enhance sustainability – and maintain their brand image – simply by switching to a different material. Wooden packaging solutions, such as compacts, lipstick cases and fragrance caps, can be designed from the outset to be refillable, reusable and easily dismantlable after use. And with the right choice of wood essence, incredible looks can be achieved.

Dismantling becomes wholly unnecessary in the case of monomaterial components. Where wood previously lacked functionality, designs like Quadpack’s Woodacity closure systems allow the material to function like plastic. This eliminates the need for caps to have plastic inners. Instead, their interior structures allow them to snap, twist, push or click securely onto a bottle. Monomaterial design simplifies recycling, but wood lends itself perfectly for reuse or a second life, too. Think wooden jars as jewellery boxes or wooden caps as seedling markers. In a recent collaboration between Quadpack and Spain’s prestigious EADA business school (5), students proposed alternative end-of-life scenarios for its monomaterial wood closures, based on collection, reuse and seeding. It is this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that opens up a world of potential towards achieving circularity.

Taking a step back, one of the environmental benefits of wood is clean manufacture. Transformation uses less water and energy, compared to packaging made of fossil fuel-based materials like polyolefins. Its conversion process is generally much cleaner than other standard packaging materials. No high temperatures are needed for treatment, nor are any chemicals or water required for production.

Wood is a renewable material in more ways than one. Production scrap can be collected and repurposed into secondary products like chipboard or animal bedding. Factories equipped with a biomass plant are able to process wood scrap to generate thermal energy. Quadpack Wood, for example, uses it to power its temperature control systems and wood-drying ovens. This practice not only minimises waste, but also lowers fossil fuel dependency.

On-site processing further shortens the carbon cycle through bypassing external waste treatment.

Of course, any wooden component needs to be finished with some kind of treatment. Decoration techniques like spray coating do have an environmental impact, as they produce volatile organic compounds. Here, too, however, the effects can be mitigated by emission control systems. Regenerative thermal oxidisers are designed to transform volatile organic compounds into harmless substances like water vapour (H₂0) and carbon dioxide (CO₂).

So wood is clean to harvest and transform, but the goal is circularity. A circular design looks to extend a pack’s use, by making it recyclable or reusable. Rather than disposal at the end of life, it looks to ‘close the loop’, by transforming the used pack into raw material. This technical cycle is applicable to plastics, some types of which can be chemically or mechanically recycled to make new packaging. Wood, on the other hand, has vastly different properties. When designed for circularity, it is subject to another kind of cycle – a biological loop.

The distinction between a technical and biological loop was popularised by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s butterfly diagram (6) – now a reference in the industry. On one side, we have synthetic materials, such as plastics. The technical loop involves processes to keep these products in circulation as long as possible. On the other side, we have biological materials such as wood or cork. The biological loop sees these biodegrade, safely decomposing in the soil and nourishing new growth. Wood does not require processes like recycling to biodegrade. However, packaging can still be engineered with features to make it suitable for reuse or alternative uses, extending its end of life. In this sense, wooden solutions can combine biological and technical loops in the same product.

Wood’s sustainable properties are generally well-known, but there is still much confusion about its end of life. The lack of a domestic waste stream is a barrier to its uptake for many brands. After all, regulations tend to focus on the recycling of plastics, which are more persistent in the environment and pose greater pollution risks. In this case, recycling has a higher immediate environmental benefit. Nevertheless, the impact of wood is significantly lower than other packaging materials, even when incinerated or left to biodegrade in landfill. Eco-toxicity tests of varnished wooden caps at the ITENE Research Center in Spain have shown them to be safe and non-toxic (7) when left to degrade in soil. Life-cycle analyses have also proven that wooden caps compare favourably to plastic caps in terms of environmental impact (see Figure 1) (8).

Figure 1. LCA comparison of a monomaterial Woodacity® cap and others made with PET, PP and aluminium. Wood shows a lower impact in all metrics besides circularity and solid waste, as LCA tools currently do not factor in the biological loop and focus on domestic recycling, even though wood is mostly safe to discard or incinerate.

It is true that, for beauty packaging, wood is rarely used alone. Most often, it is combined with a bottle, a compact tray or a stick mechanism, but these, too, can be designed for circularity, though subject to a different loop.

Sustainability is a journey, after all. There are no instant, perfect solutions, but that should not stop anyone from moving in the right direction. Wood is an easy step in that journey, a powerful move towards circularity. This natural material has so much to offer, especially when manufacturers and brands continue to push its limits. Working together, such collaboration turns wood packaging into a premium, responsible and truly circular experience.