Ian Montgomery - $500B to Move the World to an Entirely Sustainable Packaging Supply Chain

On this episode, we’re joined by Ian Montgomery, a sustainable design strategist at EcoEnclose and the former founder of Guacamole Airplane, a studio known for pioneering some of the most creative and technical work in sustainable packaging.

Ian has worked with top-tier brands like Nike, Whole Foods, Allbirds, Dell, and Flamingo Estate, helping them radically rethink how materials, storytelling, and infrastructure intersect. Today, he's helping scale regenerative and circular solutions at EcoEnclose, one of the most innovative packaging suppliers in North America.

Ian shares the messy realities and exciting breakthroughs shaping the future of sustainable packaging - from seaweed polybags and algae inks to the limits of compostables and why infrastructure (not innovation) might be our biggest barrier - and what he’d do with a $500B budget to fix the system.

Episode Highlights:
🌎 What the packaging industry gets wrong about sustainability
♻️ Why flexible plastics are the “final boss” of recycling
🧠 Smart strategies for early-stage brands with tight budgets
🌿 The promise (and pitfalls) of seaweed, mushroom foam & hemp
🔥 Why he's surprisingly pro-plastic—if done right
📉 Compostability vs. recyclability: which path makes sense today?
🏛️ How he’d reallocate $500B to fix end-of-life infrastructure
🔬 Processing tech and non-tree fibers that could change everything

Table of Contents:
00:00 – Ian’s background & EcoEnclose intro
04:00 – State of the sustainable packaging union
10:00 – Breakthrough materials & market shifts
17:00 – Advice for DTC brands scaling sustainably
23:00 – Recyclable vs. compostable: real talk
30:00 – What makes a material “valuable”?
36:00 – What Ian’s changed his mind about
38:00 – If Ian had $500B to move the world to 100% sustainable packaging

Links:
EcoEnclose – https://www.ecoenclose.com/
Follow EcoEnclose on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ecoenclose/?hl=en
Follow Ian on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-montgomery-414a0964/

Follow Adam on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg
Check out https://www.kitprint.co/ for CPG production design support.

Transcript

Adam Steinberg (00:00)

all right. Welcome to Shelf Help today We're speaking with Ian Montgomery, who is joining us from Sausalito. Beautiful little town just north of San Francisco. And, Ian is a sustainable design strategist at Ecoenclose and close a really cool and innovative packaging manufacturer focused on sustainable packaging solutions, which we'll dive into here before joining the EcoEnclose and close team Ian was the founder and creative director of guacamole airplane.

which was a design studio focused on sustainable packaging that worked with some really big name brands like Nike, Whole Foods, Dell, Harry's, et cetera. So yeah, that, let's get into it just first off, just for the listeners that aren't all that familiar with EcoEnclose and clothes, just give us kind of a quick overview in terms of kind of the origin story, why behind the company, some of the core products you guys offer and any like one or two exciting updates if there's any you want to share and then we'll jump in.

Ian Montgomery (00:55)

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on your show. Econclose is great. Their packaging supplier, I first came across with them when I was in-house with them when I was running a studio. They were one of the manufacturers that would really take our wacky ideas seriously and help us bring things to life. I came across them as a client and always loved working with them. Gosh, I should have a better read on the origin story, but as I recall, think...

The business originally started around non-toxic diapers and childcare materials and that sort of thing. But within that, they had developed a polymailer with like 100 % recycled content. And the current owners, husband and wife, Sloanie and Kyle bought the company and really saw the potential, maybe 10 years ago or around that, and saw the potential for it to really be a leading provider of sustainable packaging with the e-commerce boom. And now they've leaned into primary packaging.

Adam Steinberg (01:29)

Thank

Ian Montgomery (01:52)

I'm probably like, gosh, I'll speak wonders to how great they are. probably not the best person to speak on behalf of them because I'm in my little niche working on materials and design and events and cool stuff and inventions. yeah, they're just a great company. Love working with them.

Adam Steinberg (02:08)

Just to level set, I know this is a really broad question, so I'll let you take it however you want. But just give us the lay of the land in terms of the sustainable packaging space and where it is today. Maybe kind of like a state of the packaging union, if you will.

Ian Montgomery (02:24)

Yeah,

that's a good question. think sometimes to look at things where they are today, it's helpful to compare them to maybe where they were 10 years ago. And that's sort of in the differences there. Things come to life, but 10 or even 15 years ago when I was starting my career as a designer, interested in that sort of stuff, there were not a ton of manufacturers, polymer scientists, really.

pushing this stuff in a way that was available to an average small to medium sized business. were like big chemical companies working on polymers and that sort of thing. And then I think also in the last 10 years, there's been a like consumer.

just like flood of awareness around how our packaging maybe isn't the most sustainable thing in the world and gosh, all sorts of things you could point to. But I think like maybe in 2018, National Geographic's really deep dive into ocean plastics was a big one. And so sort of a general frustration with all the e-commerce waste people were getting. More recently, concerns around toxicology and microplastics and that sort of thing. So I think it's like, go back to your question.

They're the state of sustainable packaging. There's a big sort of consumer want and demand and almost expectation that brands deliver there, which is good where that can sometimes lead to though, or like it's good. That's great. That is all good. And then also in tandem with that, it's like complex because they're

can sometimes be contradictory definitions to sustainability that can both hold truth and both be correct. You can look at sustainability as purely focusing on the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and designing your whole supply chain to really be decarbonized. And that's a totally valid way to go about it. You can think about sustainability in terms of reducing waste, ensuring everything is recyclable or in certain niche cases compostable and that sort of thing. You can think about sustainability in terms of community health and

development and that sort of thing, local supply chain that's all supporting itself, which is also wonderful and valid. Something I really like about EcoEnclose is they've put a lot of work into how they think about sustainability and they really look at all products as really aiming towards either circular or regenerative. Circular meaning that, for example, with a

stand up pouch or a poly bag, you're using as much post-consumer recycled resin as you can in that, creating a circular process, actually creating demand for the recycling stream, thereby facilitating recycling. Or regenerative, being the feedstocks that go into the paper aren't using a ton of like...

gnarly pesticides and chemical inputs. You have a high yield per acre, it's low impact, not a ton of water use, that sort of thing. And I think that's, that's a really great definition. That's a little different from where I sat previously running an agency, the definitions of sustainability and often in those cases would vary brand by brand based on if it was a big fortune 500 company, their overarching sustainability goals that often were around plastic reduction or other companies might have.

You know, different more specific goals are on take back programs and that sort of thing. And so there's often contradictory like narratives and goals within the space. And that's not to say like there's a right or a wrong. It's just important to level set and make data back decisions to really work towards progress.

Adam Steinberg (06:01)

Diving into that a bit more, looking back over the past decade, I know you've been pretty close to the sustainable packaging world for quite a while. Where do you feel, taking a step back, where do you feel like the most progress has been made over the past decade or so in the context of pushing sustainable packaging forward?

Ian Montgomery (06:17)

Gosh, I know like, yeah, I know you probably have a pretty good take on this too, from, from where you sit, but gosh, 10 years ago, if you wanted, if you were 10 years ago, I was working at a clothing company and we wanted to step away from plastic poly bags and.

apart from how difficult of a supply chain like transition that is just purely even finding the polybags was impossible then like it's not that the materials were out there and that sort of thing but they weren't available at anywhere near a like a cost effective rate or even at the scales that we would have needed so that's just one example of like there are just so many more

design solutions out there for designers that's so great. It can almost become overwhelming to sort through and you can feel like you need a master's degree in sustainability to actually like get a read on this material versus that material versus that material, but it's, you know, it's all part of the process. So it's, it's great. The thing, and then there's like in tandem with that, there's been like a ton of investment in the last 10 years in either material science companies, polymer companies, coding companies, that sort of thing to

allow converting partners like Eco Enclose or like some of the giant ones across the country to be able to work with these materials, which is wonderful. There hasn't been a ton of investment or innovation in like the recycling or end of life space. There are exceptions to that. There's like more AI sorting and recycling centers, which is a good thing, but the end of life is still difficult where like any flexible plastic

packaging, we're very limited into like what's going to happen. There's 99 point whatever chance that that's going to end up in the landfill unless you set up a super specialized take back program. Compost abilities kind of become a buzzword, but with a few exceptions, like most packaging even designed for compost ability to the ASTM D6400 standard like isn't ending up in compost facilities. And for the most part, the compost facilities don't want them, whether that's

Screening out things that look like them that might be plastic whether it's messing with the organic certification whether it's just not worth the labor because these things aren't really adding any value to the compost stream in terms of nutrients, whatever it is different reasons and then I think probably the other change that would have blown us away 10 years ago is the Not necessarily like a national landscape, but the state-by-state landscape around extended producer responsibility Oregon Colorado, California and others

really introducing legislation and Oregon's up and rocking and other states, kind of California is still working through how EPR is exactly going to look. But the high level like look of that sort of stuff is taxing producers who create hard to recycle materials and using that money to

invest in recycling infrastructure. Whether or not that's a good idea is like open for interpretation. And I'm certainly not speaking for EcoEnclose and close here, but my own personal take is I'm a little bit wary of it because it is going to be a tax that's passed on to consumers. And it just seems a little more complicated than it needs to be. And I worry it's also going to stifle innovation. But I don't want to be a hater like

stifling something that is an upwelling of goodwill that it would have been impossible to imagine 10 years ago. I went recently and sat in on one of the EPR meetings around California's bill, SB 54 over in Sacramento. It kind of cool. I'd never done anything like that, but you can just go to the EPA building and watch the advisory board have a conversation about how they're going to put together this bill and what materials will be classified as.

you know, recyclable or not. yeah, I know it's, it's government is a messy and tedious and requires a ton of patient process. And I have nothing but respect and gratitude for the people pushing these things forward, not criticizing any of them as people, I just, I just worry it's not the move.

Adam Steinberg (10:25)

Yeah, definitely could see why for sure. Well, maybe on the other side, progress that's been being made over the past few years, that's like certain areas in the sustainable packaging world that you feel like are starting to accelerate and evolve really quickly. What's one or two things that come to mind that you're feeling most excited about right now in this world?

Ian Montgomery (10:46)

gosh, so many things. I think some of the seaweed polymers that Sway is developing are incredible and they're going to continue to get better and more more bio-based content. But the fact that a brand can use a predominantly seaweed-based poly bag that can work through their supply chain, be printed on, be heat sealed, have an adhesion strip, it's just amazing. It's beyond anything I would have dreamed about when I started my career. That's so cool.

Coming down the line, I'm really excited about the innovations in barrier coatings. I think that's going to open up paper packaging in ways that are only going to continue to get better and better as long as we're not putting a heavy deforestation strain on our supply chain by doing that. Some of the inks are just incredible. The Eco Enclose is working with using bio-based pigments as opposed to fossil fuel-based pigments. Gosh, there's so much.

There's so much out there. feel like almost every week you come across some, some new thing. that's so great when it's all done in a, you know, kitchen or lab scale, but I have so much respect for the people who are really commercializing them too, and bringing these solutions to life through, you know, so that they can work through our supply chain.

Adam Steinberg (11:54)

Yeah, totally. Do you think in this is, this might be going down to too much of a rabbit hole, but one term that I've always been excited about,

is like bio mimicry.

Ian Montgomery (12:04)

love that stuff. I had a wacky professor in college that the class was biomineralization and it was all like the process by which like corals or seashells or even are like bones form and.

like you think about a seashell and it's just like such an incredible material, like so light, such an amazing composite. we're diving into how like NASA has looked at mollusk, like the mollusk maker as like a really interesting model for spaceships. And now they've never been able to like replicate that sort of polymer and that sort of thing. So in theory, I just think it's so cool. Have you seen that website asknature.com, the biomimicry website?

Adam Steinberg (12:46)

think I've heard of it. I feel like I heard of it like a long time ago. I haven't been there a while, but it sounds like a little bit familiar.

Ian Montgomery (12:50)

might not still be

around. can't remember. I don't know, but at least five or six years ago, we always used it as a resource in the design studio. It was cool. It was set up by something called the Biomimicry Institute as a way you could any look at water repellent or look at an origami structure and seek out examples in nature of inspiration.

I was never able to incorporate like biomimicry like formally into my design process. I was like, okay, here's the sketching phase. Here's the biomimicry phase where you always pull something out there. just as inspiration, anything we're trying to do probably exists in nature. The challenge is just making it work through the complex supply chain of manufacturing what brands need and e-commerce delivery, Shelf stability, that sort of thing.

Adam Steinberg (13:41)

Yeah.

Yeah, totally,

shifting gears a little bit. I know you, at least one of your, I don't know if you started your career, like one of your first jobs right out of college was at Chubby Shorts, which was, I think at a time when that brand was exploding and they were growing really quickly. How did your experience there shape

how and where you wanted to take the rest of your career specifically, obviously in this sustainable packaging direction?

Ian Montgomery (14:06)

I got so lucky to get a job there. was just out of school. My first job was as their graphic designer. There were probably 10 or 15 people there when I started quickly grew up to 30 or 40 and was there for a couple of years, sort of at the helm of an art department. And, um, gosh, like it was so inspiring and so chaotic. And I appreciate it so much more and more as I get older, but was working for a company where like,

I don't think anyone was, would have been older than 26 or 27 years old. Like the founders were probably that age. I was 22. And so I considered them so mature and wise at the time, but we were all kids. And, but there was this incredible, they had tapped a nerve with the company. And then there was this just really incredible upswell of, of, energy around it. my job was sort of like,

Bridging the product team and the marketing team was where we'd be working on anything from clothing, woven labels to silkscreen graphics, to the website, to building out storefronts, to putting on events, to the packaging is how I really got deep into packaging, trying to get away from their plastic poly bags. gosh, like they were so just scrappy and inventive. they, you, it was so cool to just be in a small room and watch the creative like leadership at that team come up with an idea.

and like execute it within like two or three days and see results. So it definitely like encouraged me to be entrepreneurial and start something. So many like funny stories to think back and remember. They were that kind of like border the line between like genius and a little bit stupid, but they somehow work. Like I remember once there, there was an idea to do something called the future thank you card around Christmas where

Adam Steinberg (15:43)

Thank

Ian Montgomery (15:51)

The idea was a teenager could send their mom or dad a thank you card for the pair of chubbies that they would be given at Christmas. And you're like, listen to this. You're like, this is so ridiculous, but we've made a digital version and a print version that sent out however many of them. like within a week turnaround, there's like thousands and thousands of them being sent and it drives like an incredible swell of Christmas gifts to kids. So I don't know. was really like, yeah, it was, it was just a very.

unique and moved very quick place. yeah, no, they've, they've, they've gone on and been super successful. It's so cool to watch.

Adam Steinberg (16:27)

reflecting on that experience or now just working at ecoenclose and clothes and all the stuff you've done at your agency for D to C focus brands that are in a similar space to where, Chubby's was that are scaling super quickly, but they also want to try to really put a focus on more sustainable packaging solutions. Like how would you maybe suggest they go?

about that without sacrificing growth and sacrificing that hyperscale growth of their experience. And that may be another way to look at it as like where, where does it feel like the potential for maybe low hanging fruit is.

Ian Montgomery (16:59)

Absolutely. Yeah, it's an interesting one too. I'm sure you see it in your world where you're like, working with companies that might just be doing their like, minimum viable product proof of concept and they have 20 different things they want to cover and sustainability is one of 20 things on that list. And oftentimes, like, it doesn't make sense to do a huge investment in time and money into sustainability at that point. think something that

I'd imagine you could relate to, and I definitely look to even in freelance work outside of this is like the first pass or even the second pass at a product. We're not looking at sustainability is reinventing the wheel and investing in custom tooling for a custom form and really doing some full material exploration. It's just sort of that like pragmatic look at sustainability and like, what's the least amount of waste we can have.

in our suite of packaging. Let's just be really mindful. Oftentimes, if you do a lifecycle assessment of the whole packaging suite, your dollar per dollar spend on all the pieces will pretty much match up with the carbon water toxicity footprint of the package itself. if you are really doing a cost reduction strategy, that's probably the good way to start is a brand's launching.

But then there's that trade-off like during a brand's introductory year or two, you do want to do some storytelling and you do want to maybe invest a little bit more in a experience that introduces the brand until a couple of years down the line or you have familiarity and repeat customers and you don't maybe need to make that same investment. But what opens up in that world once you are hitting units in the six or seven figures, then it can be really quite.

can make more sense to really look holistically at the international and domestic landscape. OK, and then think, let's do a material audit. Let's do a vendor audit. Let's actually look at if we should invest in custom tooling. How can we make a five-piece system, a two-piece system in clever ways, that kind of thing? What's the end of life where our customers are in terms of recycling and that sort of thing? So yeah, it's different at every stage and every opportunity. is different.

possibilities, but I think sustainability, when you are talking with people who are just starting their company, they think they have to invest in some new material. It's like, no, no, no, that's probably the last thing you want to do. Let's audit the stock options and see what makes the most sense.

Adam Steinberg (19:24)

Right.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, one thing I was curious about getting your take on is like talking about recycling versus composting compostable or biodegradable packaging

what's your take in terms of the pros and cons of each and maybe like where or when does it make the most sense for, each of these two options?

Ian Montgomery (19:47)

Love it. Yeah. And again, I'm not speaking for EcoEnclose and close with any of this stuff. Totally. I think recyclability is the way to go. It really works well with aluminum. That's probably like 50 % of the value of the average blue bin is in the aluminum. Cardboard looks great. Paperworks great. Within plastics, like hard, like as in just like a bottle or a solid substrate, PET number one or HTPE.

Adam Steinberg (19:50)

For sure, yeah, this is your personal opinion.

Ian Montgomery (20:14)

Number two in clear white, definitely like a good value for those. You might get some value out of polypropylene or polystyrene. Maybe you might not. And then all the flexibles, all the soft plastics, which is really where so much primary packaging is going is, is rough. So it's like overview. It's like recycling is traded as a commodity. And if you can, anyone who's interested in this stuff can look at recyclingmarkets.net and.

look at how much a bale of a different type of plastic is trading. And that correlates pretty directly into what is being recycled in your local municipality. So I'm rambling. Sorry. So it's tough. We can sit here theoretically and say, it's always best to design in something that will be recycled. But probably something you see in your work, too, is so many projects make sense to just

do in a flexible pouch in a coffee bag in a standup pouch in a sachet in some other form coming out of a roll stock. And if you run a life cycle assessment on that stuff, it's always going to score better than any hard packaging in terms of its footprint. There's a totally valid great case to be made for that's like the lowest impact packaging as well, despite the fact that end of life is landfill. And so you can look at that as like, okay, let's, if we are using that form factor, let's maximize recycle content and

That's what we can do to move forward there. Or we could set up a take back program. But oftentimes, those do more harm than good and just shipping bags across the country that may or may not be made into some hard plastic. But if they're set up well, they're great. There are a ton of instances where those are set up well. In terms of composting, I think it's got to be the, it's so case by case. Like the,

I think you can look at the U S compost council or one of those organizations has a website of like a state of composting in the country and who accepts what very, very few people, definitely less than 5 % of the U S population have access to like a curbside green bin compost that will accept like a PLA or like a commonly made compostable plastic. so

If you're looking at that as like a generalized across the country strategy, it should be done with the awareness that you shouldn't just do it for the end of life. There should be other benefits to the material, like to run a regenerative feedstock like seaweed, as opposed to something like corn or whatever it is. Not said, I think that the case for compostable are really when the material serving as a vessel to bring valuable compost into the compost stream where it's like, be it.

takeaway food container that can bring food into San Francisco's compost stream or whatever it is locally with paper-based thing with some bio-based coding. think that that stuff works great. But composting is interesting though. Like it's in the last couple of years, there's been a couple of companies that have like recognized the challenge of municipal compost and have come up with solutions that are a little bit more localized. There's two consumer good companies. One's called mill. One's called Lomi that are

either a home or a restaurant or a business scale. Yeah, yeah. They're kind of interesting. mean, you can always criticize something right off the bat as maybe this doesn't make sense, but you see where they're going and you're like, that is like a valid use case where you think about something those at a scale of a restaurant or an airplane or a cruise ship or whatever, where it's like all the way or hotel, all the waste in that little entity is designed with composable polymers.

Adam Steinberg (23:23)

Yeah, I've seen Loney for sure,

Ian Montgomery (23:48)

It's all being processed. have a single stream end of life for everything. think that kind of makes a ton of sense. And then to get a little heady and trippy, I think an idea that has, we'd always tossed around our old design studio was like, is the municipal water stream the ultimate like end use of our waste in a perfect world 50 years out where every

building, every home, every business, has a version of that digester, almost like an in-sync-erator that you'd have in your home sync, but much larger with some sort of temperature gauge that's really serving to where you could like either flush or throw down the sync. All of your compostable packaging, that could be broken down into its base components, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, whatever, and then that's just flowing out.

into the municipal water treatment plant going through anaerobic and aerobic digestion before it goes into the water. There's so many flaws with that idea too, but I don't know, just throwing it. It's like kind of fun to go through. Yeah. Cause it's like, I don't know. Yeah.

Adam Steinberg (24:47)

Thank

it seems like some people would probably argue, people that are maybe a bit more skeptical of this kind of sustainable packaging world, they'd ask the question, is it realistic to expect consumers and or companies to make the effort in terms of if it takes an extra step to do recycling, as an example? And I'm curious, any strategies that you've thought about or business models that can help make recycling

more of the default action

rather than having to take some extra step, if that makes sense?

Ian Montgomery (25:20)

Maybe it makes me a cynic, but I probably agree with that cynical perspective where it's really totally, totally. I think it's really tough to design things that require an extra step of labor. I've been a part of so many reusable packaging initiatives and projects that have just hit a ton of pushback there and requiring that extra step. And you might end up with a reusable package that only gets used twice as opposed to 20 times. then it...

Adam Steinberg (25:24)

Yeah, I mean, think it's something you have to be realistic about. Yeah.

Ian Montgomery (25:46)

cost 10 times as much energy to make as a single use plastic. So you end up with a negative, that sort of thing. So I definitely try to be like really cognizant of ensuring any designs that I personally a part of are like, what's the word, not idiot proof, but.

the path of least resistance, the path they're most likely path through the waste stream and through consumer behaviors is like that's realistically thought through and done. So I guess an example of it is like anything that's compostable given the fact that there's so little.

access to composting for packaging in this country should be an intellectual and environmental case for that material with the expectation that it ends up in the landfill. That sort of thing is, I think, good thought experiment for all these things. And then it also flips it on its head where it's like, what are the ways you can design so that

Adam Steinberg (26:37)

Yeah.

Ian Montgomery (26:50)

there is like a value and a natural pathway that's the pathway you want for materials. Like, I guess, like a cool story. Do you, have you ever heard like the story of like cores and the aluminum can?

Adam Steinberg (27:03)

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I know, I think at least I've heard that they actually have some sort of sustainable or recycle-related aluminum can business that's a side, another part of their business under their umbrella that's actually become a huge business. I don't exactly know about it, but I've heard that it's become a really big business for them.

Ian Montgomery (27:22)

And it goes back to like, I think like the Coors grandpa or I don't know, I'm speaking a little out of turn, but like back in like the forties or fifties or something, when they were in Colorado, they were looking at all the old beer cans that were like steel and rusting on the sides of the roads. And they had that kind of.

bot and others were also having it at the time. Like if we made these cans out of something that was higher value out of aluminum, that would incentivize recycling. And, rather than like pressuring people with an ad campaign or something, does they designed that recycling and reuse into the product. And I always looked at it. just like, what a, like a power. I'm still having aluminum liquid death can right here, but what amazing.

And then they were able to bring the cost down, cost down, cost down through all these years. I think there's like seven forming steps to get this lip and cap on. It's crazy. But yeah, I think as much work that can be done on the back end for any design, any sourcing project to ensure that there isn't too many extra steps for the consumer is always a way to go.

Adam Steinberg (28:22)

I know you've worked with, you know, a lot of different sustainable packaging materials, whether we're talking about seaweed or algae inks or mushroom foams, that kind of stuff. I'm curious,

what's your favorite material to work with and why, and then

what are some of the materials that you're excited about that maybe haven't really been commercialized yet, but you feel like have some big potential?

Ian Montgomery (28:44)

Absolutely. I love working with Seaweed. This goes back to even just being a student, but did a project with Flamingo Estate, which is like a, I don't even know how to describe them, but they sell like,

farm to table goods out of Los Angeles. And we had showed their head of procurement some of these seaweed samples that we had coming over from Indonesia. And the shoe was just so cool and scrappy. They were like, oh yeah, we want to figure out as a way to package some chocolate. Let's see if we can figure it out. And it was just such a fun process to actually run seaweed on a die cutter on a Kongsberg and figure out how to get the cuts and figure out how to heat seal it. So yeah, that project has a special place in my heart. It ended up being shipped out as like a promotion with the

Adam Steinberg (29:19)

Thank

Ian Montgomery (29:28)

like tomato chocolate and it was cool. It was just fun. It's like, my gosh, we did it. It's out there. and so, yeah, as these materials come to life, the challenge is almost not knowing exactly how they're going to respond to form, what technical properties they're going to have. You might have a TDS and an MSDS and that sort of thing, but there's still so many unknowns that are a fun, messy process to discover what they're good at and what they might not be good at and work within those constraints.

mushroom foams are another one that we've leaned less and less away from for packaging, but such a cool application for product. Even like around me at the moment, I've had like a decade long fascination with recycled plastic and in architecture. And in two weeks, we're going to start building a parklet, which is a parking space for the city of San Francisco, shaped like a giant fish and all the shingles of the fish will be.

this reclaimed plastic that people have been collecting around San Francisco and some of it's mixed in with old fishing nets and that sort of thing. So anything hands on, definitely, definitely enjoy. And then in terms of like exciting stuff coming down the line, I definitely am excited for all, everything that's happening with like non-tree fibers, whether it's like.

Adam Steinberg (30:28)

That's awesome.

Ian Montgomery (30:45)

We've probably all worked with like bamboo and bogus and molded fiber, but looking beyond that, what are the low impact crops that we can get great papers from? And I think just today or yesterday, like Mohawk released their Miscanthus line of paper. It's just so cool that that's out there. I don't know, there's always just cool stuff going on. If anyone's listening to this, Canopy is a really cool organization to pay attention to their work in the regenerative fiber space.

Adam Steinberg (31:11)

we'll call them out in the notes for sure. not to be a downer, but any materials you feel like are, that are touted in the sustainable packaging world that are overhyped, that are being over-invested in or where resources maybe should be allocated elsewhere?

Ian Montgomery (31:27)

Yeah,

there's a ton of materials that probably don't make sense for packaging, but investment has pushed them into a certain corner. I try not to be a hater because you can actually you learn so much from when things don't work. Like you can look back and like think of all the enthusiasm around corn a decade or a decade and a half ago as ethanol fuel or as corn based PLA plastic.

And in a way, like it was kind of wacky, but you're glad it happened because it gives you a framework to evaluate the next generation of bioplastics as things like, okay, we shouldn't be using land for agriculture to be growing biomaterials. And we should really not just take something at face value that compostable is good, but we really should be looking at inputs full life cycle and that sort of thing. So I'm generally like positive with like, I'm never like bummed if I see someone get a big investment. It's like,

we'll learn something and things will go sideways and new things will be discovered. If anything, there's probably, and that's just the way that I guess a return on investment works, but there's probably an over investment in materials and an under investment in infrastructure. And I don't know how to fix that, but I would love to see more of that. I don't know if maybe AI will be able to

Adam Steinberg (32:42)

For sure. Totally. How about on the other,

outside of

materials, are there any

new processing if that's right, we're processing technologies that are being explored that could enable

more, I guess, conventional materials to be converted into formats that could be like, turn them into more sustainable formats that could potentially be recycled or composted. If that, that makes sense?

Ian Montgomery (33:08)

make sense. Yeah, I mean, all sorts of things come to mind that are sort of tangential to it. One is like, there's the idea of chemical recycling, the idea that you'd break something down into its base components and have it reassembled into a polymer rather than mechanical recycling, which is heat it, melt it, reformat it. Generally, the critique of chemical recycling is that it's too energy intensive, but you think of a world moving towards

huge investments in renewables and also nuclear power to power AI data centers. Maybe this math around chemical recycling starts to be totally different and that opens up a whole world of end to life for flexible packaging. That's great. Sort of philosophically around converting, there's this idea that materials are grown rather than processed. it's a tough one to enter the packaging space in because packaging is generally so low cost, so low margin. It's like hard to compete there.

Adam Steinberg (33:39)

Hmm.

Ian Montgomery (33:58)

But a few examples of that have been EcoVative's grown mycelium that seems like they're moving more into things like mushroom-based bacon and mushroom-based insulation material, product design material, where they can get away with slightly higher cost. But conceptually, it's super interesting that you could grow materials on the scale of packaging. Another polymer is what's it called? Danimer's company.

PHA, fermented bioplastic, and there's been some real setbacks in that space with the enema closing down. But conceptually, that's super interesting too. And then also in terms of processing, it wasn't that long ago that the farm bill passed in the US that enabled hemp to be more of an agricultural crop. we still haven't, there's definitely mediums. There probably are things that I'm not aware of.

Adam Steinberg (34:39)

Thank you.

Ian Montgomery (34:47)

But I still have not seen like a huge large industrial scale paper processor that can handle just how gnarly hemp fiber is. And as soon as that investment gets made and the hemp papers are at scale, that opens up all sorts of worlds for like, you know, these like crops like hemp that are just super fast growing, super low input base to really be like part of the conversation and more large format packaging rather than just like niche little note cards and that sort of thing.

Adam Steinberg (35:16)

Yeah. Now that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I I don't really understand why the, mean, there's so much, been so much focus on

hemp from the, consumables standpoint or like the psychoactive side of things. but hemp from

an industrial standpoint. There's just so many use cases that I like people have been talking about for so long and that people that it's been dabbled in, but yeah, I totally agree. It doesn't feel like it's, that's really received like the investment that I feel like it needs to

Ian Montgomery (35:33)

Totally.

here's another one for you though that makes me think of it. Cause there is some cool hemp with like molded fiber and pressing it is a little simpler than converting into a super fiber.

Adam Steinberg (35:49)

Yeah. Hempcrete is a thing that

some people have explored. It hasn't really been used

broadly, but I know like one thing about, know it's, it's totally fire resistant. So

all the places like

Northern California, where we're from, where there's

huge risk of fire. Like, I don't understand why hempcrete has not been started to be used more.

Ian Montgomery (36:04)

my gosh, you ought to imagine in all the rebuilding after Los Angeles, there's a lot of architects looking at that at the moment.

Adam Steinberg (36:07)

Right.

Another question is what's something you've changed your mind about in the last few years when it comes to sustainable packaging, sustainable materials, this whole kind of sustainable packaging world?

Ian Montgomery (36:21)

Oh, good question. I think it's probably funny. I, uh, 19 years old, studying environmental science, surfing and seeing just plastic on the beach everywhere. It like got me really interested in packaging that ended up becoming the senior project and theme of the career and come coming full circle. I'm probably quite a bit more pro plastic than

the average environmentalist, you think it's an amazing material. It's the material itself isn't bad. It's designing the products and really paying attention to infrastructure and supply chain to make sure it's not full of toxic additives and phthalates and BPAs and that sort of thing. And also you have a pathway to make it as circular as possible, but I'm surrounded by plastic and in awe of it every day. It's like a real Marvel wonder of the world.

Adam Steinberg (37:15)

It sure is. Yeah, it sure is. Alright last question for you, um, this is a crazy question.

but let's just say that you were given, I don't know if this is enough, maybe it's not enough, whatever number you pick, but like, let's just say you were given a budget of $500 billion to shift

the entire world's economy to

an entirely sustainable packaging ecosystem. Uh, and like

the willingness of the key stakeholders to make the effort are in,

where would you start and

what would the key steps look like to make that transition?

Ian Montgomery (37:48)

That's a fun question. Gosh, I'd love to hear your answer too. I think I would, gosh, a lot of this stuff we talked about, a couple of different routes. We have the skunk works working on the like long-term projects, that vision of using municipal water treatment as a waste stream for composting. We've got that whole thing up and rocking and building. Got a lab of people making these giant.

Adam Steinberg (37:51)

I have no idea what my answer is.

Ian Montgomery (38:15)

energy efficient, you know, composters that can lock in, lock in under a sink. think that's, that's a good one. And that serves to like enable development and composting infrastructure. I think you invest a ton in there's this like movement towards paper and all the packaging, which get away from plastics, but the risk is it's really putting a, putting our like forestry at risk. And so.

really investing in kind of what we were talking about, like paper processing plants that can handle alternate fibers, hemp, flax, canaff, wheat straw, that sort of thing, just agricultural waste, cover crops, things that are low impact or actually regenerative to the soils that can provide an alternate income stream to agriculture in the US. And then at the scale is such that they're not some weird little specialty note cards, but they can be used as a liner board on corrugated cardboard, that sort of thing.

So really, really push into that stuff. And I think you put a ton of money into flexible plastic recycling. think that's really the missing key. You look at energy efficient chemical recycling, you look at bacteria and natural things that can sort of serve to break these things down. You look at

Okay, in a world with an electrified grid and not diesel trucks, but electric transit, when does like pick up for these things start to make sense? And there's never going to be the value designed into them that there's a take back market, but you have a world that's totally different drone delivery and that sort of thing is a drone is coming back from something can it on its way back, pick up these flexibles that that type of thing, I think becomes interesting to so a large scale investment in

modernizing recycling infrastructure and then a third of the money is just in skunkworks wacky ideas.

Adam Steinberg (40:12)

I like this. To summarize,

figure out ways that you can implement things that they can all just go into the existing waterway. think they make total sense. There are ways you can process more

difficult fibers, like, know, alternatives to paper because of the forestry stuff.

this stuff really makes a lot of sense actually. I like it.

this has been awesome. Really appreciate the time. think this has been super helpful. think listeners are to be excited about a lot of stuff. think a lot of people have a lot of aspirations and would like to move to more towards sustainable packaging stuff. So where can people kind of follow along with you or any of all the cool work you're doing?

Ian Montgomery (40:45)

Gosh, for the EcoEnclose stuff, definitely follow them on LinkedIn.

For my personal work, that's sort of looking at these material considerations, both in and outside of packaging. Instagram is the department of frogs and birds. That's where the park little bee and some experiments with different polymers. yeah, anyone can just, I'm on email, ian@ianmontgomery.com I take on freelance work. So happy to chat. But Adam, thank you for doing the show. It's super cool that you do this.

Adam Steinberg (41:08)

Perfect.

Ian Montgomery (41:10)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Adam Steinberg (41:11)

Yeah, it's been great.

Yeah, really cool stuff. Really appreciate the time.