Sustainable Packaging - Why less is more

If you’re a company looking to green your supply chain and reduce your environmental impact, one area you simply cannot overlook is packaging. Sustainable packaging strategies can be cost neutral or in most cases can reduce cost, considering transportation efficiencies, lower material costs, reduced handling, and waste disposal cost etc. It is definitely a low hanging fruit when it comes to greening your supply chain if you can’t retrofit your entire fleet to hybrid engines just yet. Most importantly, with today’s discerning customer, packaging also says a lot about who you are as a company. If customers have to dig through mountains of packaging paper, bubble wrap, and cut through clamshell casing to get to the actual product, chances are they won’t put your company high in their list of ‘green’ companies. Moreover, if you’re a company trying to sell eco-friendly products, you’re in danger of losing credibility.

Packaging means different things to different people: it’s used in everything from the delivery of raw materials for manufacture and shipment of products to the actual product packaging. At each step there is potential to utilize sustainable packaging principles and minimize waste. To make matters easier, there has recently been an explosion in sustainable packaging materials. Packaging options that are easier on the environment yet match the performance and cost efficiency of virgin material can be found with a little research.

Innovative materials and packaging can make a bold statement, generating intrigue and make the experience (and your company) that much more memorable. One of these options is using recycled materials. Using recycled content in packaging is clearly sustainable – it prevents virgin material from being mined or extracted, and has a much lower carbon footprint since it uses less energy and water in its processing. But it fulfils one other important function – it closes the loop, so that there is a demand for recycling programs and less waste filling up landfills or incinerated.

Recycled Paper – recycled paper can be used in the cardboard, paper board and filler material. In the past, the quality and print-capability of recycled paper board was a concern, but a lot of improvements have been made in recent years making it comparable to virgin paper board. They key metric here is the % of post consumer recycled content. This can range anywhere from 10% to 100% - obviously the higher the % the better, environmentally speaking. Molded pulp packaging has become all the rage for companies wishing to lend a green aura to their products. A few examples of companies using 100% recycled molded pulp packaging are Lexmark, Apple, RIM, Yankee Candle, Aveda, and Kohler.

Recycled Plastic – you may have heard of fleece jackets made of recycled soda bottles, but what about recycling it back into packaging. Considering the enormous numbers of PET soda and water bottles which pour into recycling centers and landfills, it is natural that there are a growing number of packaging products using recycled PET, or rPET. It has the same benefits as any recycled material in terms of material, energy and water savings, plus it is recyclable.

Plant-based plastics – these look just like their fossil-fuel based cousins but are made from corn starch, sugar, tapioca, bagasse etc. Most manufacturers claim their material to be biodegradable and to lower emissions of greenhouse gases compared to regular plastic. Since this a relatively new material, care has to be taken in qualifying these claims. Walmart is using biopolymer from NatureWorks to package fresh produce. Many other companies are beginning to use bioplastics in packaging e.g. Frito Lay Sunchips, Coca-cola, and in products e.g. HP, Ricoh and NEC.

Perhaps the most important sustainable packaging strategy is innovation. The simplest way to green packaging is to use less packaging in the first place. That means designing your processes to increase product to package ratio, consolidating shipments, differentiating between the products (fragile, non-fragile), and using the no more packaging than required to protect the item being packaged.

Today many companies are engaged in an effort to demonstrate their efforts towards environmental sustainability. Sustainable packaging can be a visible way to show that commitment to customers.