Month: April 2012

Categories
Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Kids' Science Challenge – Down to the Wire!

Some of you may have been following the SPC’s involvement with this year’s Kids’ Science Challenge, a nationwide competition for third to sixth graders to participate in hands-on learning about science and engineering. This year’s challenge included three topics to choose from: 1) Animal Smarts: come up with an activity for captive animals to utilize their wild instincts; 2) Meals on Mars: invent a creative way to produce, cook, deliver, or grow food on Mars; and 3) Zero Waste: develop a packaging idea that does not end up in the landfill.
The Kids’ Science Challenge received 1,436 entries across all three challenges combined, with 395 for the Zero Waste Challenge. All these entries had to be evaluated and that task fell on a group of preliminary judges including educators and other folks from Cyberchase (the PBS educational television series for children age 6-12 that teaches children discrete mathematics), Mythbusters, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California. These good folks did the hard work of reducing the nearly 400 entries in the Zero Waste Challenge down to a manageable set of semifinalists for the group of packaging judges, which I am a part of. Our input will be combined to determine the finalist(s), and this year’s winners will be announced in early May. The students with the winning entries will get to visit a team of scientists and engineers for a day to make their experiment or prototype come to life.
In the meantime, I’d like to share the following insights taken out of context from the project descriptions submitted by the kids purely to show a common story that reveals some big topics we all grapple with. Enjoy!

  • “One of the biggest problems these days is there is too much trash!”
  • “We get our paper [newspaper] in a bag every day, so it made me think of where that plastic goes after we get done with it.”
  • “The Earth needs to be able to have no pollution on it. Plants and animals have been getting sicker and sicker because of pollution and it’s terrible! That is the main reason why I made this idea.”
  • “It is really important to reduce the waste to keep our earth cleaner and healthier for ourselves and for generations to come.”
  • “We came up with the idea by brainstorming and writing our ideas on a piece of paper.”
  • “We were brainstorming when we laid [our] eyes on one of our classmate’s beautiful lunch bags and POOF, the vision came to our minds.”
  • “I decided on the topic Zero Waste, because I love nature and I love trees. I hope my idea could protect nature and save the trees.”
  • “I realized that nature had come up with a perfect package [oranges and bananas].” So why even make it [packaging]?

Here are some new made up materials and terminology from the kids for all the marketing and branding folks out there:

  • Phytoplastic: plastic that could be made from post harvest wheat and corn straw
  • Biopotastic: plastic that could be made from potato processing waste
  • Biococoplastic: plastic that could be made from coconut husks
  • Weg: Super strong material that could be made from spider silk. Of course WEG also stands for Webs Ending Garbage because the material will be composted or recycled.

In the end, one kid’s phrase stuck in my noodle and I leave you with it. “All I’m trying to say is the product I thought of is a really good product.” Be sure to stay tuned for the announcement of the winners on May 2nd!

Categories
Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Market Price of Recycled Material Just Doesn't Match Its True Value

This article by GreenBlue Program Director Anne Johnson appeared in this month’s issue of Packaging Digest, which features a monthly column by GreenBlue staff on packaging sustainability. Read the original article.

As a brief review of Economics 101, a free market is one where prices are determined by supply and demand. In the past several years, we have seen a steady rise in the price of many commodities, most notably oil, metals and the products that are in turn impacted by these price increases.

Aluminum also has seen price increases. Worth between $0.70/lb and $1.00/lb, aluminum cans are one of the most valuable packaging materials used. So why did we throw away 1.3 billion pounds of aluminum last year? This is equivalent to the aluminum in more than 27,000 Airbus A320s, according to Alcoa. (PSI EPR Dialogue, Jan. 19, 2010)

Using an average value of $0.85 for baled used beverage containers, this represents more than $1 billion thrown in U.S. landfills annually. So why aren’t we recycling more of them? Isn’t that what a free market would suggest should happen, especially when we have industries clamoring for these materials? Because aluminum is such a valuable resource, this is a prime example of how the free market is not adequately addressing the value of materials.

Aluminum has been the backbone of many recycling systems, yet its recycling rates have remained flat below the 50 percent mark over the past five years, according to EPA estimates (which do not include cans imported for recycling). Aluminum Assn. recycling rates do include growing numbers of cans imported for recycling purposes, according to the Container Recycling Institute, and show rising recycling rates over this same period from 52 percent to 58 percent.

So how can it be when some material pricing is at market highs, U.S. aluminum can recycling rates are not increasing proportionately? Where have we gone so terribly wrong that there is a disconnect between the value of a material and our infrastructure to recapture that material?

Perhaps we have done too good a job on selling convenience and disposability. While our grandparents and great-grandparents of the Depression Era were radical savers, the current generations are so far removed from where things come from that they are also removed from the value of the materials they buy. We have encouraged a system where we blame consumers for not participating in the recycling system, yet we send signals that products are disposable-not valuable-to make it convenient for everyone. Marketing shapes behavior and, as marketers know, consumers are Pavlovian. If consumers are rewarded, they tend to respond.

To incentivize behavior that recognizes the true value of resources, the regulatory response in some states has been container deposits. But we are still throwing away over $1 billion of cans a year so this incentive is not enough. Outside of regulation, there is a role for marketers who influence and shape consumer behavior to get in the game in a coordinated and meaningful way to develop effective recycling messaging that drives consumer behavior, such as through the SPC’s Packaging Recovery Label System.
The alternative is to continue bearing the consequences of some of the lowest recovery rates in developed countries, which equals money down the drain. The idealism that the free market would keep valuable materials out of landfills is not working, so it’s time to think about other market incentives or drivers to prize aluminum and other materials for the valuable resources they are.

Categories
GreenBlue

Standardization and Experimentation Both Needed for Innovation

My colleagues and I have been grappling with what seems to be a persistent conundrum in the sustainability community: that standardization is both a rallying cry of industry and a warning cry of sustainability advocates. Can standardization (via consistent metrics, reporting structures, etc.) help to drive innovation in the long run, or does it instead reinforce the status quo, thwart innovation, and result in higher orders of “sufficiency”?
This is perhaps a false dichotomy, however, as it’s not clear that standardization and innovation are truly at odds with each other. Why should we have to choose between our need to standardize processes versus the desire for continued creativity and experimentation? Ultimately we need both for greater innovation and more sustainable practices.
It is not only PR or marketing departments that want greater consensus and alignment about which sustainability issues are important to prioritize and which are more tangential or well-intentioned “eco-noise.” The ever-present challenge of limited resources (time, attention, human, financial, etc.) with which to explore emerging sustainability issues naturally leads companies to seek standardization to ensure that such exploration is profitable.
But in the eagerness to drive sustainability into something that is more predictable, manageable, and efficient, we must realize that we are just stepping onto the learning curve, not cresting the apex of it. Otherwise the impulse to standardize terminology, conceptual frameworks, what’s important to measure, how it gets measured, and progress assessments may well create another dangerous form of inertia called “sufficiency.” If we drive everything too much toward standardization, sufficiency may move us towards the lowest common denominator—and lose the unpredictable innovation that has defined the sustainability movement.
Like forms of democracy, the human energy, creativity, and experimentation necessary for us to evolve our understanding and practice of sustainability is going to be long, messy, and non-linear. To truly balance the “planet, person, prosperity” equation will require patience, humility, and different measures of progress than we are accustomed to using.
Despite the debate of consistency versus creativity, the truth is sustainability has relied on both standardization and innovation as changes to the status quo often follow the rhythm of divergence and convergence. Pragmatism, caution, predictability, and efficiency favor the forces of convergence (standardization). Creativity, disruptive thinking, risk-taking, and experimentation favor the forces of divergence (experimentation). It is this necessary form of co-dependency that leads to innovation of all sorts. So while one side laments the glacial pace of consistency and the other laments the messiness of the process, we must remember that standardization encourages experimentation, and vice versa, which leads us, unpredictably, to new forms of innovation.

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Uncategorized

Market Price of Recycled Material Just Doesn't Match Its True Value

As a brief review of Economics 101, a free market is one where prices are determined by supply and demand. In the past several years, we have seen a steady rise in the price of many commodities, most notably oil, metals and the products that are in turn impacted by these price increases. Packaging Digest

Categories
GreenBlue

Top Five Fun Facts: April

Eric DesRoberts continues his monthly series of facts and tidbits he’s uncovered during his research to better understand products and packaging. You can also check out his past Fun Facts here.
1. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the liquid refreshment beverage market grew for the second consecutive year to 29.5 billion gallons in 2011.  Energy drinks showed the highest growth rate from 2010 at just over 14%.
2. It is believed that nearly 200 million eggs (~17 million dozen) were purchased for Easter celebrations last year. This is dwarf by the 90 billion (~7.6 billion dozen) produced in 2010.

3. March 22 marked the 19th annual World Water Day. Nearly 900 million people currently lack access to clean water, and this number is expected to increase to 2/3 of the world’s population by 2025.  Here are other fun facts around water demand:

  • The average American household uses 350 gallons of water a day
  • Making a pair of blue jeans requires nearly 2,900 gallons of water
  • It takes three liters of water to make a one liter of water bottle (before the water is added)

4. Each second, 330 people buy something from a Wal-Mart store. At 2.1 million employees world-wide – this is roughly the cumulative population of the 50 smallest countries.
5. Data from the 2011 International Coastal Cleanup revealed that over nine million pounds of trash were collected along shorelines around the World. Cigarettes, caps and lids, and plastic bottles were the top three most commonly collected items.

Categories
GreenBlue

Electrolux's Vacs from the Sea

In researching options for our new office vacuum, we came across Electrolux’s Vacs from the Sea initiative. The purpose of this initiative is to raise awareness about the plastic waste that ends up in oceans and along their shore lines with the hope of increasing recycling efforts.

As the Electrolux team explains on their website:  “Our intention is to bring awareness to the situation and the need for better plastic karma. So far, over 60 million people have been reached and we are continuing the initiative following the great response.”
Along with partners, and in some cases local communities, they organized collection efforts using various methods (beach/coastal cleanup, coral reef diving, and trawling) along and in our five oceans. They then took the reclaimed plastic and created vacuums with statements specific to the region from which the plastic was collected, and each one of the five is a unique work of art.
While Electrolux is not currently able to use the reclaimed ocean plastic in mass production they are thinking of auctioning off one of the vacuums to further research in this area.
“Right now, only post consumer plastic on land meets our commercial safety and quality standards. However, as part of our commitment to researching new materials, we should explore how the ocean plastic might be used in the future, and one such step is to make a single concept vac that we can auction out,” says Electrolux’s Cecilia Nord.
Check out their blog on this great initiative.