The US packaging industry must improve material recovery and not “bury its head in the sand and pretend the problem will go away” according to an expert. Food Production Daily
Month: May 2012
Categories
Top Five Fun Facts: May
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. During the SPC Spring Meeting in Toronto last month, I was surprised to learn that about 1/3 of all food produced for human consumption is either wasted or lost. This equates to roughly 1.3 billion tons of food waste. North America is reportedly the highest contributor at nearly 300 kg/per capita/yr with roughly 100 kg attributable to consumer waste. Grist has a few suggestions on what to do with your spoils at home.
2. PayScale recently ranked 850 US colleges by 30-year net return on investment. Harvey Mudd College, Caltech, and MIT round out the top three, and while ROI may not be the best performance metric, it provides an interesting perspective on college education.
3. May is National Bike Month. It is estimated that 0.5% of US workers commute to work on bicycles. Over 85% of people reportedly drive to work (with an average of 1.07 workers per vehicle), about 5% of workers utilize public transportation, and about 3% walk.
4. “There are more Barbie dolls on the planet than there are Americans.” This fun fact came to me in a preview of a new documentary project titled “Do I Need This,” of which the underlying theme is to get consumers to make more conscious purchasing decisions.
5. Employee stress results in roughly $300 billion in lost productivity annually. Adequate sleep, regular exercise, exposure to green space, five minute breaks every hour, and setting aside time for vacations can all help lower this number.
This year marks GreenBlue’s 10th anniversary. At the end of our first decade, what will the next decade bring for the sustainability movement? We’re asking this question of visionaries, thought leaders, business innovators, scientists, and educators. Read other interviews from the Next Decade series about the future of the sustainability, products, and business.
Over the past ten years, the s
ustainability movement has evolved beyond simply raising awareness or complying with environmental standards. It has now become an essential strategy for business to maintain a competitive advantage. A leading voice for this point of view is Bob Willard, who was the keynote speaker at last month’s SPC Spring Meeting in Toronto.
After three decades in senior leadership at IBM, Bob now dedicates himself full time to building corporate commitment to sustainability, and he has spoken to hundreds of companies to sell the business value of new ways of working. Last year, Bob was one of the five inaugural members of The International Society of Sustainability Professionals Hall of Fame, along with Gil Friend of Natural Logic, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Karl-Henrik Robert of The Natural Step, and Ray Anderson of Interface, who recently passed.
Bob’s landmark book, The Sustainability Advantage, just came out in a revised 10th anniversary edition, as The New Sustainability Advantage. A single sentence from the book sums up his whole philosophy: “The business case for sustaining the planet is stronger than the business case for trashing it.” We asked him to elaborate.
Your work provides a compelling economic case for sustainability. If it can save money and increase profits, why isn’t everyone doing it?
That question was screaming in my head when I finished the first edition of The Sustainability Advantage in 2002. So I did a doctorate at the University of Toronto to research what the inhibitors were, and I found that the biggest obstacle for companies is an entrenched mindset. Based on regulation-driven end-of-pipe efforts, business people can’t believe that anything to do with “environment” or “green” can be good for business. To overcome that mindset, we have to show the value in hard-nosed business terms: how much more revenue could they make, how much they could reduce expenses, and how could they mitigate material risks. That is, we need to meet them where they are and sell them on the competitive advantage of embracing sustainability strategies.
You identify five business models in progressive stages of sustainability: (1) Pre-Compliance, (2) Compliance, (3) Beyond Compliance, (4) Integrated Strategy, and (5) Purpose/Passion. The primary difference between stages 4 and 5, you explain, is that one does the right thing because it’s good business; the other practices good business in order to continue to do the right thing. You’ve said that currently there are no large, publicly traded companies that have achieved even stage 4. What will it take for that to change?
They have to want to get to Stage 4 and fortunately some companies do. Regulations drive laggards to Stage 2, but can’t drive them to Stage 4. The only reason they will aspire to Stage 4 is if they realize that they could be more successful at that stage than at Stage 3, where they are simply capturing the low-hanging fruit of savings on energy, water, materials, and waste expenses. That’s why the Sustainability Advantage Dashboard and Worksheet Simulators are so helpful. They help executives project how much more bottom-line profit they could reap if they were to reach Stage 4. Once they are at Stage 4, they will have the courage to officially change the purpose of their business to embrace the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability and move to Stage 5. Stage 4 is an interim stage. A few companies, like Interface, might make the leap from Stage 3 directly to Stage 5, but most companies will need to get to Stage 4 using today’s business model before changing to become more values- and purpose-driven. Ironically, this does not require any sacrifice of business success. In fact, it is where the sustainability advantage really kicks in.
Who are some of the companies you feel come closest to achieving sustainability today?
Any B Corp, such as Patagonia, Seventh Generation, any co-operative, Interface, Ben and Jerry’s, New Society Publishers (my publisher), and many other small- and medium-sized companies founded by enlightened owners have many of the right criteria. I am increasingly distrustful of sustainability rankings, out of concern that they are celebrating the best of a bad lot. We need a better “gold standard” against which to assess companies’ progress.
The 10th anniversary edition of your book shows how much business has changed in recent years. How do you think business might evolve before the 20th anniversary edition comes out?
The take-up in sustainability strategies as enablers of business success in the last five years has been very encouraging. Based on a survey of 1,251 companies referenced in the UN Global Compact Annual Review 2010, 54% of business leaders agree that we will reach the tipping point by 2020, when over 20% of influential companies embrace sustainability strategies. That would be wonderful, and may happen sooner.
You give away your work readily. For example, your website provides a free calculator for businesses to estimate the cost savings they might achieve with various strategies. Why don’t you charge for such a service?
As a certified B Corp, my business model is a bit unusual. I am purpose driven. I would hate to look back in 10-20 years and regret that we had not progressed as far and as fast as we needed to on the sustainability agenda because we had not provided sustainability champions with easy access to helpful tools to get the job done.
My mission is to provide effective resources (books, DVDS, worksheets, dashboard, slides, etc.) to ensure that sustainability champions can credibly accelerate the pace of change. This is not about making money. This is about changing the world. Fast.
The Kids’ Science Challenge is a nationwide competition for 3rd to 6th graders that encourages hands-on participation in science and engineering. Partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the students are presented with three topics each school year and they are invited to submit their own ideas or experiments to solve these issues. The student with the winning entry in each category then collaborates with a professional scientist or engineer in a research setting to help bring their idea to life. For the 2011-2012 school year, one of the topics for the challenge was around sustainable packaging, an area in which GreenBlue has developed significant expertise through our largest project, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC). The Zero Waste challenge asked kids to come up with a creative idea for packaging that never ends up in a landfill. Over the past year, we’ve played an important role in helping to shape the Zero Waste challenge, and you can read more about GreenBlue’s participation in the challenge here and here.
The winners were announced last week, and this year’s Grand Prize Winner in the Zero Waste challenge is Joshua Yi, who is in the 3rd Grade at Warnsdorfer Elementary School in East Brunswick, NJ. Joshua came up with a nifty idea for toy packaging that actually becomes part of the fun. The idea, “No More Trash But a Package of Fun,” as Joshua calls it, was inspired by all the waste created by Christmas gift packaging and wrapping. Joshua stated in his entry, “I decided to pick Zero Waste because I wanted toy packages to be a fun part of the toy and will not be instantly disposed to the environment.” The new package he designed “converts the toy package into a fun, integrated, part of the toy, it not only protects the environment by saving packages, but also adds a lot of fun to children.” One of Joshua’s designs was for a toy car package that converts into a racetrack, and the second was a doll package that unfolds into a board game:
As the Grand Prize Winner, Joshua will venture to New York City to turn his packaging idea into a prototype. To create his package design, Joshua will work with SPC members Laura Tufariello, founder of Design and Source Productions, a company that develops, designs, and produces creative eco-friendly packaging, and Steve Mahler of Caraustar Industries Inc., a manufacturer of 100% recycled paperboard and converted paperboard packaging solutions. Congratulations to Joshua on his innovative package design!
Categories
The Responsible Business
On May 4, at the Living Futures conference in Portland, I had the great pleasure of hearing a keynote by the uproarious Carol Sanford. Her latest book, The Responsible Business: Sustainability & Success, voted one of the best business books of last year, outlines stories of 30 companies that became more socially responsible—without ever declaring their intention to do so.
The funny thing about this book on sustainability is that the author hates the term.
“I know nothing about sustainability,” says Sanford. “I don’t even know what that is.” Her publisher encouraged use of the word to boost sales, but Sanford was hesitant. “I don’t work for corporate responsibility. I work to make great businesses.”
For Sanford, greatness in business means shifting away from conventional goals. Sustainability often is defined by the Triple Bottom Line, which expands the concept of value to include not just economic but also social and environmental value. Yet, as Sanford points out, these terms are “still within the limits of the old choices.” To unleash the full potential of business will require turning the whole idea of value on its head: “A Bottom Line is what is left after all is made and sold. Top Line is the growth of health of the stakeholders and the system that ‘makes them up’ as it works together.”
Sanford calls this new notion of value the Quintessential Top Line, which reorganizes the traditional “supply chain” as a collaborative network of value creators. It “embraces suppliers as co-creative partners, not merely links in a chain.”
This vision of supply chains as a mutually supportive community explains her aversion to the term sustainability. “People talk about sustainability as being about how the ‘parts’ come together. Nature doesn’t work like that. There aren’t any ‘parts’ in living systems.” There are no parts, there is only the whole. “You have to think of a whole within a whole, like a tree in a forest.”
One of our biggest activities here at the SPC is our biannual convening of stakeholders in the packaging community for networking and knowledge sharing. We call them the Spring and Fall Meetings, and we like to kick things off at each of them with tours that whet everyone’s appetite for the impending multi-day conversations on sustainable packaging. Sometimes we’ll tour a facility that manufacturers packaging, sometimes we’ll tour a facility that deals with packaging waste (yes, we’re fascinated by garbage, and no, it usually doesn’t smell as bad as you might think). So long as it lives somewhere near the intersection of packaging and sustainability, we’ll tour it so the packaging community can learn more about it.
As much as I love learning about garbage (that’s only partially sarcastic – it’s absolutely worth studying), I hope you can imagine my delight when it was suggested that we look into touring one of Toronto’s many esteemed craft breweries as part of this year’s Spring Meeting, which took place a few weeks back. The search wasn’t long before we found a win-win with Steam Whistle Brewing. Win number one: this company conducts business with sustainability considerations near the forefront. Win number two: they’re located less than a half mile from our event. Actually, make that win-win-win – after all, they do brew beer.
Brewery tours are generally geared towards the beer-inclined, but their staff did a commendable job of appeasing the packaging-inclined. One of the unique parts of their brewery tour is a trip through the offices where the creative department and administrative team work, which was especially great for us because we got to meet Chris Johnston, who oversees all of Steam Whistle’s packaging procurement. I got the impression that the normal routine is for the tour group to pass through the office and simply receive a smile and a wave from the staff, but my tour group subjected Chris to much more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was later remarked that we asked Chris more questions than he’s ever been asked in his decade of being a stop on the tour.
We talked about the PVC lining on their crown closures. We talked about the considerations of using pry-off caps versus twist-off caps. We talked about paperboard beverage carriers. And we talked about the age-old question of whether to use aluminum cans or glass bottles. Overall, Steam Whistle’s glass bottles took center stage, and for good reason.
Beer bottles in Canada are quite different than the ones we’re used to in the States. It’s common for brewers to use the Canadian Industry Standards Bottle (ISB), which is a refillable container on which a refundable 10-cent deposit is levied. These bottles use a considerably larger amount of glass than the single-use bottles we’re used to, but they can be reused 15-20 times before they fail (we were told that failure occurs most commonly at the finish – that’s the threaded part at the top). The deposit system provides a high rate of return to ensure that they are collected for reuse and eventual recycling.
Steam Whistle, however, chooses to use a bottle of their own design. Their bottle uses 30% more glass than the ISB, but it can be reused up to 35 times. The tradeoff? Whereas brewers using the ISB can take in used bottles put forth by any other brewer, Steam Whistle must take back their own bottles – and they distribute coast-to-coast in Canada. It opened up intriguing questions among our tour group about a number of sustainability tradeoffs, and certainly whet our appetites for an enjoyable couple days of focusing on sustainable packaging. And it also whet our appetites for more beer. Big thanks to the Steam Whistle team, especially Chris!
…However, for those of you looking to go above and beyond, Lance Hosey over at GreenBlue has provided a list of his personal favorites; books that have influenced his thinking on sustainability. The list covers all sorts of topics, including globalization, deep ecology, and humanity’s connection to nature, while also ranging in years from 1967 to 2010. Metropolis Magazine
During the SPC Spring Meeting in Toronto last week, we debuted video submissions from the first-ever SPC Packaging Stewardship Video Challenge. All SPC member companies were invited to submit short videos highlighting their company’s progress, innovation, and commitment to sustainable packaging. The videos were intended to inspire, educate, and encourage viewers, and the challenge was a great way for members to learn more about the activities of fellow member companies, as well highlight the good work of SPC members and the collective impact of the coalition. The theme of this year’s challenge was: How is your company making the SPC definition of sustainable packaging come to life? The video challenge was generously hosted by BASF.
From the 13 videos that premiered at the meeting, SPC staff selected their top three favorite videos, and the meeting attendees voted for their top video choices in three categories: Best Innovation, Best Implementation of the SPC Definition, and Best Video. And the SPC Video Challenge awards go to:
Best Video: cei/InterGroup International
http://youtu.be/Qbex4-rZ3N0
Best Innovation: The Coca Cola Company
http://youtu.be/N8ZJMMl07fU
Best Representation of the SPC Definition: Starbucks
http://youtu.be/b_VLtEvypek
SPC Staff Picks
cei/InterGroup International
http://youtu.be/Qbex4-rZ3N0
Schawk/Anthem
http://youtu.be/20hGifGno2w
REI
http://youtu.be/aTnjFLqayYU
All winning videos are now available on the SPC website. Congratulations to all of this year’s Video Challenge winners and thanks to everyone who submitted videos!
As part of our increasing work in recycling and recovery, Project Associate Danielle Peacock and Senior Manager Anne Bedarf are debuting a new recycling blog series, ReLoop, which will address different recycling topics, questions, and concepts. Danielle kicks the series off with a primer on single stream recycling. If you have a specific recycling topic you would like covered here in the future, let us know!
There are three primary ways to collect household recycling: single stream, source separation, and no separation from trash (or “all in one”). Each of these methods poses unique benefits and trade-offs for recycling. This first installment of ReLoop tackles single stream recycling, which is quickly becoming a national trend.
Single stream recycling requires households to use two separate collection bins for their waste, one for trash and one for recycling. Residents place all of their recyclable materials in one bin, separate from their trash container.1 On collection day, the materials are transported to a Material Recovery Facility, or MRF. The MRF will use a combination of hand sorting, sensors, magnets, and gravity to sort the materials. You can find a great animation of how a MRF works here. After sorting, the materials are baled and sold to market.
Many communities are transitioning to recycling carts that are of equal size to trash bins. This enables and encourages residents to collect more recycling than they could fit into a small tote bin or bag. Communities may even use the same trucks to collect trash and recyclables, minimizing any additional transportation or operating costs. The same truck may pick up your trash one week and recycling the next. Trucks can also be designed with dividers, so that trash goes in one section and recycling in another.
The Good: Putting all recyclable materials into one container makes recycling easier for households. Ease of use, and the prevalence of large bins, allows high collection volume. Participation in recycling is also incentivized when communities reduce trash collection to twice a month and provide increased recycling collection to compensate.
The Bad: While volume is increased, the quality of the materials that are recovered can suffer. When recyclable materials are lower in quality, they fetch a lower price at market and may be used in lower quality products. For example, if a glass jar full of sauce breaks during the recycling process, the sorting equipment may not catch the glass and the sauce will contaminate other materials, like paper. Sorting is also an imperfect science, though the technology continues to evolve.
It is important to place empty and clean materials into your bin, and follow all recycling instructions provided by your community. If you have any questions or comments about single stream recycling, leave us a comment below!
1. The US EPA definition of single stream recycling: “Single stream” collection programs allow participants to put all recyclable materials (e.g., paper, bottles, cans, etc.) into one collection container… These materials are then collected and separated, usually at a central point such as a materials recovery facility (MRF)… For single stream recycling to work, the processing facility must sort the recyclable materials properly and thoroughly to meet market specifications.”
I was recently cleaning out my tennis bag and discovered an impressive collection of old tennis balls and ball canisters from last fall. As a member of the packaging community, my first question was, “How can I keep these out of the landfill?” Packaging Digest
