Navigating complications

Can manufacturers and fillers are facing shifting sustainability reporting requirements, Keith Nuthall reports.

The metal packaging sector prides itself on its recyclability and circularity, but its ability to demonstrate this good practice through ability reporting may become increasingly complicated, depending on where companies are located.

Unlike financial reporting, where the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) accounting systems are used in most major countries (spanning 169 jurisdictions), the picture for sustainability reporting, incorporating key ESG (environmental, social and governance) data, is far more opaque.

An effort to create a global statistical baseline for reports explaining how companies are exposed to and may handle climate change problems, plus other sustainability challenges, has yet to gain global traction. An attempt has been made to do this through the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), a sister body of the IASB, which was launched in 2021 and issued its first sustainability reporting standards in 2023. These were IFRS S1 (international financial reporting standard) on general sustainability disclosures and IFRS S2 on climate-related disclosures.

But this has yet to be accepted as the dominant global rule for how sustainability is reported. The ISSB, in June 2025, released details of how just 36 jurisdictions worldwide have so far adopted (or are preparing to adopt) its rules within their national sustainability reporting regulations. It says that 17 governments have finalised these regulations – Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Hong Kong, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tanzania, Türkiye and Zambia. And it reported that 19 governments have proposed or published fully or partly ISSB-aligned standards or requirements. These include Bolivia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines. Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Uganda, the UK and Zimbabwe. Three more governments are expected to follow suit soon – but that is far from a universal consensus.

Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) has gone its own way on sustainability reporting, passing European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and insisting on mandatory reporting for larger companies through the EU corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD). This applies to such companies operating in all 27 EU member states, and European Economic Area (EEA) members Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Its requirements have been more comprehensive than the ISSB model, as it has also included so-called ‘double materiality’ concerns, reporting on companies’ impact on the environment and climate, as well as their exposure to climate and sustainability-related issues, which is the focus of the ISSB’s ‘single materiality’ system.

That said, under the new second European Commission of its president Ursula von der Leyen, (in office since 1 December), the EU is paring back requirements of the ESRS and pushing back implementation to decrease its burden on reporting companies, reducing the contrasts with the ISSB model. The EU Council of Ministers has backed Commission plans to increase the employee threshold for mandatory sustainability reporting to 1,000 employees and add a €450 million net turnover threshold. It wants to remove CSRD requirements from listed SMEs.

In April, the European Parliament backed plans to delay mandatory reporting by larger enterprises employing fewer than 500 people and parents of large enterprises from 2026 to 2028; and listed SMEs from 2027 to 2029.

In the US, however, American sustainability reporting plans that have been developed by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) have been halted altogether under the Trump administration. The SEC, in April 2025, abandoned defending legal challenges at the US Court of Appeals to climate disclosure rules released in March 2024, mothballing the plans.

The rules largely followed single materiality principles of measuring the impact of climate change on reporters. Large companies would have had to report double materiality data about direct greenhouse gas emissions and energy purchase indirect emissions. But the rules had been suspended pending a ruling on the legal challenges.

In the meantime, many countries have continued to encourage voluntary reporting under different standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), whose standards have been a key inspiration to and hew more closely to those established in the EU under ESRS.

GRI offers general as well as sector-specific reporting models, (for instance, on the metal mining sector), something that the ISSB has done, by incorporating the formerly independent SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) models. These are now being brought inside the ISSB’s system and hence given legal weight in jurisdictions following the new global regime.

These SASB standards are also now under review and include specific detailed reporting requirements of direct relevance to the metal packaging sector and its suppliers.

The ISSB has released two extensive drafts amending SASB standards and amending industry-based guidance for the ISSB’s IFRS S2 standard on reporting climate risks. The changes include a comprehensive reform of standards for eight industries in the extractive and minerals processing sector and the processed foods industry; and smaller changes for SASB standards for a further 41 industries on topics such as water management and workforce health and safety. The revised IFRS S2 guidance impacts advice for reporting by the nine prioritised industries and 37 of the other industries covered by SASB.

There are currently 77 specialist SASB sustainability reporting standards, including those on containers and packaging; alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages; processed foods; medical equipment and supplies; industrial machinery and goods; electrical and electronic equipment; waste management; metals and mining; and more.

An ISSB note said the SASB standards serve as guidance for applying IFRS S1, helping “companies identify and disclose material information about sustainability-related risks and opportunities…” They “identify the sustainability-related risks and opportunities most relevant to investor decision-making in 77 industries,” it said.

Major metal packaging corporations already release sustainability reports and so should have little problem adapting to a world where such public assessments are mandatory – although the approach they have taken us far from uniform.

Image: European Commission – Cristophe Licoppe

A good example is Poland and US-based Canpack, whose EU-links has seen its 2024 sustainability report generated in line with ESRS “where feasible,” including double materiality assessment data. “The CSRD, ESRS, and other relevant regulations will continue to guide and shape our approach to sustainability reporting,” said the Canpack report, which was 222 pages long. It includes key performance data bullet points, such as total group energy consumption being 1.47 million MWh in 2023; scope 1 direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions being 306,272 tonnes CO₂ equivalent that year; scope 2 energy, heat and steam purchase-related emissions, 379,260 tonnes; and scope 3 value chain emissions, 3.1 million tonnes.

The report has enabled Canpack to highlight its sustainability-promoting changes, such as increased investment in renewable energy, stressed a foreword from CEO Marius Croitoru, with plants all running on green energy, where possible, and where not, the company purchasing energy source certificates giving accurate generation data. The CEO and the report stressed the increased proportion of recycled aluminium in feedstock – up from 61 per cent to 70 per cent for can bodies from 2022 to 2023.

Image: User:Colin/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0

By contrast, the 2024 sustainability report from US-based metal packaging major Crown Holdings was largely constructed using the voluntary GRI reporting standards, with some information assessed under SASB guidelines.

That also included data on energy usage and scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions, with Crown claiming that it has reduced its scope 1 and 2 output by GHG emissions by 26 per cent between 2019 and 2024 baseline, and scope 3 emissions by 16 per cent, along with information on waste collection, water management, and more. Crown engaged UK-based Lucideon CICS Ltd to provide limited third-party assurance over the report’s GRI disclosures.

The Luxembourg-based metal and glass packaging major Ardagh Group has taken another contrasting approach – releasing a shorter 2024 Sustainability Roadmap, with all the major ESG datapoints, such as GHG emissions (also falling), energy usage, product lightweighting, water conservation and more. Ardagh uses another voluntary system for its data collection – developed by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). It has released a detailed set of datasheets for its glass packaging arm, based on CDP reporting models.

Finally, US-based Ball has a long track record of issuing sustainability reports, having done so since 2010. In 2021, it switched to releasing a combined annual and sustainability report, a practice it has stuck with through to its latest 2024 report.

It also has been using GRI metrics to generate its sustainability data, with the 2024 report subjected to external assurance, said Ball. Combined with the company’s financial and commercial outlook, the report includes GHG, energy, waste and water data, plus assessments of Ball’s delivery of its sustainability goals, which include circularity, climate change, resource efficiency and more.

Regardless of the corporate outlook of such information given in summary overviews, the data in such reports does give investors, customers and regulators facts and figures to assess, which should help them assess the value of metal packagers and their exposure to climate and other environmental risk.