SPC Releases Results of Member Reporting Initiative

The SPC member reporting initiative was a short term project intended to help measure progress toward packaging sustainability and capture member advancements in measuring and reducing environmental impacts. The result of this project is a newly released report entitled Member Annual Reports: Statistics from SPC Members. The goals of this report were to a) identify the number of SPC members currently collecting and reporting data on sustainability metrics, b) identify which metrics they are collecting and reporting on, and c) build on the collected data to help illustrate sustainability efforts currently applied by the packaging industry.

All active SPC members as of August 11, 2011 (199 in total) were considered in this report, and the data collected is from publicly available annual reports, member companies’ websites, the 2011 SPC Member Survey, and the 2011 Sustainability in Packaging survey conducted by Packaging Digest and the SPC. Comparing the information that we obtained from the publicly available reports with the information captured in surveys, we found that many companies are interested in collecting and monitoring environmental performance but may not be reporting on these efforts. This may be a result of the general nature of the organization (public vs. private ownership), inadequate infrastructure to monitor impacts, the inability to justify the costs associated with producing and releasing an official report, or the complexities associated with collecting information within regional or international divisions.
Seventeen metrics are highlighted in this report, and data is reported by position on the supply chain and by relative size of an organization. This information can be applied as a benchmarking tool by companies using or starting to implement data collection efforts on environmental performance. The following figure is a sample of the kind of information captured in the report:

As the information contained in this report is specific to SPC members, this report is not open for public release and is only available to active SPC members. We ask that this information not be shared with companies, individuals, or organizations outside of the SPC. All current SPC members can now download the report at no cost from the Member Resources section of the SPC website

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