December 2013 – user's Blog!

SPC Member Spotlight: The Dow Chemical Company

“Member Spotlight” is the newest addition to our GreenBlue blog where we will regularly highlight the sustainability achievements and initiatives of a Sustainable Packaging Coalition member company. For our inaugural Member Spotlight, we would like to bring attention to the Dow Chemical Company and their current collaboration with The Nature Conservancy.

In 2011, Dow Chemical Company and The Nature Conservancy announced their plans for a powerful collaboration to help the business community recognize and value nature in global business strategies. The aim of this collaboration is to protect earth’s natural systems by quantifying nature’s services and incorporating this value into business decision making.
Since the 2011 launch, The Nature Conservancy and Dow have identified crucial ecosystem services that Dow relies upon and have set up pilot sites to analyze these relationships. While one site location is still being determined, the other two are located in Freeport, Texas and Santa Vitoria, Brazil. These locations serve as “living laboratories” where the two collaborators are experimenting with methods of ecosystem valuation. Biodiversity topics being studied include natural hazard mitigation, freshwater limitations, air and water quality, and soil retention.
The Freeport location is the first completed pilot site with experimentation results currently under review for expected release in early 2014. From the start of their collaboration, Dow and The Nature Conservancy have been clear about their intent to publicly share the critical lessons learned to help anyone interested in applying similar tools.
“I truly believe that through science and collaboration, sustainability can be achieved,” said Erica Ocampo, Sustainability Manager at Dow. “Our collaboration with The Nature Conservancy is proving that and it is something we are very proud of.”
To hear more specifics about the experiments and subsequent findings of the Freeport and Santa Vitoria pilot sites, check out a recent webinar – The Economics of Ecosystems: The Nature Conservancy Dow Collaboration.

The SPC's Essentials of Sustainable Packaging

There was one takeaway from the recently released results of the 2013 Packaging Digest Sustainable Packaging survey that struck me as being particularly interesting: when asked what is needed to make packaging more sustainable, more respondents than ever before mentioned a need for their staff to be better trained in the field of sustainable packaging. More training, you say? Fear not, survey respondents, it just so happens that the SPC has a one day training seminar designed to teach the concepts of sustainable packaging to everyone throughout the supply chain.

Haven’t you heard? We call it The Essentials of Sustainable Packaging, and we’ve been teaching this course for years, to hundreds of packaging professionals, on three different continents, with a lot of success.In fact, just last month we brought the course to Oakland, CA and taught it at the headquarters of StopWaste.
One of the things I always enjoy most about teaching the course is the interaction with the participants and the ways in which we always end up learning from each other. It’s no accident that this tends to happen: making packaging more sustainable requires full supply chain engagement and collaboration, and the participants always hail from a diverse set of supply chain positions. It’s perfect. Want to know the brand owner perspective on a sustainability issue? Chances are they’re in the room, and we can ask them. Want to get the opinion of a representative from a government agency? No problem. They’re in the room too.
In Oakland I was particularly struck by the collection of attendees from Recology, CalRecycle, and StopWaste. There we were in the region with the most impressive waste management practices in the country, and in the same room were so many of the individuals responsible for making it happen, all taking part in the same collective conversation about making packaging more sustainable. Mix in our participants hailing from converters, brand owners, retailers, and the line between student and teacher quickly became blurry. But this is expected. It always ends up that the course is much more than a lecture-based seminar – it feels much more like a meeting of the minds, and this instance was no exception. It just reminds that if the packaging community feels that more training is needed, we happen to have the perfect forum to make that happen.