This week GreenBlue joined the president in celebrating our 54th National Forest Products Week.
President Eisenhower signed the first proclamation September 15, 1960, calling on the people of the United States to “observe the week beginning October 16, 1960, as National Forest Products Week, with activities and ceremonies designed to focus attention on the importance of our forests and forest products to the Nation’s economy and welfare.”
The world’s forests protect our environment, economy, and way of life. GreenBlue has a long history of collaborating with the forest products industry to protect and conserve this critical natural resource. And with National Forest Products Week coming to an end, we’d like to say thanks to all of the organizations and individuals that have worked with us this year to identify opportunities and create solutions for continuously implementing sustainable materials management practices further into the forest and paper products industry.
Read this year’s presidential proclamation here.
One of my favorite parts of SPC Advance was our tour of Aveda’s headquarters, which includes production facilities for almost all of their products.
Aveda is known for their plant based beauty products and vision to connect beauty, environment, and well-being. They have extensive social and environmental goals for products, packaging, production, and distribution. Aveda’s organizational beliefs include themes of leading by example, empowering employees, wellness, social responsibility, and treating the people and planet with respect. In my opinion, the headquarters’ operations reflected these values.
After a brief introduction, attendees broke into groups to tour the facility. We observed receiving, production, filling, packaging, research and development offices, a gym, and onsite daycare. After the tour, attendees participated in a Q&A session with an Aveda packaging professional and visited the on-site store.
Our tour reflected many of Aveda’s values, creating a consistent message from corporate goals through production and product. I observed:
A place for employees to suggest improvements for themselves or co workers;
Employee suggested safety improvements & their outcomes;
Color coded reporting of “almost incidents” and incidents of all types;
A recently hired professional devoted to ergonomics & worker health and safety;
Recycling bins; and
A very knowledgeable staff.
Why does this matter? Aveda’s values are evident in their focus on worker health and safety, empowerment, and sustainability. Integrating values from words to actions delivers on organizational goals and strengthens their brand. They are an example of focusing on many aspects of sustainability, which is at the heart of the SPC’s Definition of Sustainable Packaging.
Aveda shows that sustainability can work, it can work for you, and it can work for your employees. Ultimately, consumers are given a brand they can trust.
Once again, we have proved to ourselves that we can always do it bigger, faster, and better. This week, we continue our 40+ year streak of exceeding our annual biocapacity – our ability to supply the resources we are consuming and process the waste we’ve generated – with August 19 marking this year’s Earth Overshoot Day. If we can think about earth resources in terms of annual budgets, we are over budget for about the 45th consecutive year, and the next four months are on credit…
See what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_aguo7V0Q4
We did this. We have failed miserably. The only way forward is to be accountable and recognize the incredible pressure we are putting on our surroundings. We continue to make decisions based on unbalanced equations. We have a perceived understanding of the value of material outputs and services, while the value of the inputs are disconnected and not completely understood. Without a deeper comprehension of this relationship, we can never hope to stay within budget.
And to some extent, we’ve told ourselves this is ok – we’ve been overshooting for longer than I’ve been alive. Which leads me to ask if the problem is being over budget, or if our budgets are limited by our material and service preferences and the traditional inputs necessary to provide them? Can we grow and strengthen our earth resource budget or at the very least, the reserves? What does the budget look like when all energy inputs are renewable?
Can humans rethink the global material economy to include the costs associated with consumption that are externalized, those burdens passed on to nature and society to balance the economic equations? We will explore aspects of sustainable materials management in the coming blog articles in an attempt to elaborate on the missing pieces of the sustainability equations.
The next three issues of Fun Facts will focus on GreenBlue’s mission alignment to Sustainable Materials Management, a robust lifecycle framework with three main focuses: 1) Use Wisely looks at material sourcing; 2) Eliminate Toxicity from products and packaging, and 3) and Recover More value from the waste stream.
Eric DesRoberts continues his series of facts and tidbits he’s uncovered during his research to better understand materials used in products and packaging. You can check out his past Fun Facts here.
Use Wisely: Material sourcing and using less material inputs. Use Wisely is shorthand to explain that at each step of the production life cycle, we must seek to conserve material resources and to keep the embedded energy investment in circulation. The concept of dematerialization means combining various conservation strategies such as reducing the amount of materials needed to provide the function required, extending the service life of products, and eliminating the concept of waste by ensuring that there are robust markets to reutilize post-industrial and post-consumer materials.
Material input can be defined as the total quantity of material “stuff” moved from nature to create a product or service. Many common materials in today’s society have incredible amounts of inputs from nature, not to mention energy, water, fuel and other demands. Here is how much raw stuff it takes to make these common materials:
Research found an average of 17,000 bits of tiny plastic particles per square kilometer in Lake Michigan. One of the primary sources is believed to be microbeads used in personal care items such as exfoliants. It’s been shown that fish mistake the microbeads for food, demonstrating that these microbeads are polluting the water ecosystem and disrupting the food chain.
Of the 751 million acres of forestland in the US, 56% is privately owned. Nearly ⅔ of this land is owned by families and individuals. When considering fiber sourcing or land development, the family forest owners are key players in forest sustainability.
In 2012, there were roughly 6.3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. For every 41,600 phones recycled, 1 kg of gold is obtained and kept out of landfill. In the US, only 11-14% of all e-waste is recycled, which if applied to the global setting would mean that 5.4 billion phones are not being recycled, and roughly 131,374 kg of gold ($5.3 billion assuming $1,263 per ounce) is not being collected.
Magnets are the single largest application of rare earths, taking up 21% of the total rare earth production by volume and generating 37% of the total value of the rare earth market. Rare earth metals are used in electronics making e-waste recycling an imperative.
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) held its first “Data Jam” event on June 27, 2014 in Chicago during the week of the AIA conference. So what is a Data Jam you may ask?
In this particular case, it was a gathering of data geeks who are diligently if not enthusiastically working to increase material transparency by providing more and better information to the marketplace. In support of the USGBC’s new Material and Resource credits for LEED v4.0, they brought together for profit and nonprofit organizations representing the diversity of data aggregation, tools, and service providers that have emerged over the past 15 years. Most of these resources are dedicated to helping manufacturers collect and manage data related to health hazards and risk assessments, environmental impact or life cycle assessments, specification and purchasing, as well as other categories that employ sustainability strategies to increase planetary health, while reducing business risk.
The USGBC asked all participants to fill out a survey in advance of our Jam session in order to get our perspective on what the data needs may be for industry and the marketplace. While the results of the survey did not reveal any significant surprises, the USGBC’s efforts to get consensus and a sense of prioritization of these needs and potential solutions was very useful. Below were the two core questions, along with responses in order of importance to the data jam participants: What does the INDUSTRY need to advance health and environmental issues in building materials selection and manufacturing?
More data (e.g. product ingredient lists, data on health impacts)
Better data standardization (e.g. standards for data and meta-data reporting)
Expertise interpreting data (e.g. experts trained in analyzing data)
For the #1 INDUSTRY NEED selected above, what is the best way to address this need?
Greater industry cooperation around proprietary information
Cross industry collaboration (e.g., more activities like this data jam)
Improved consumer education
More funding
Reduction in cost (e.g., cost of access to data)
All respondents agreed that material transparency is dependent on increased access to data as well as a diversity of tools and resources designed to provide greater access. Data standardization and better translation of toxicological data into useful information for multiple audiences are also essential ingredients for transparency.
The USGBC event brought together an impressive list of stakeholders who are working on solutions to increase transparency. With that said, the stakeholder group that continues to be poorly represented in all of these meetings I’ve attended are the suppliers who make not only the finished products but also all of the intermediate products that go into the finished product. The only way we will successfully characterize finished products is by reaching far upstream in the value chain to define all of their root level inputs (i.e., mixtures or formulated products and materials, “articles”, that make up complex components and assemblies).
Suppliers of these intermediate products are our primary partners in this endeavor, and as we plan future meetings and data jams, we need to find a better way to get this group at the table. Only with all of these perspectives represented, we will be able to truly assess the best ways to design and implement a more transparent and effective system for communicating the human and environmental health attributes of products.
Take a look at the Material IQ website to learn more about how GreenBlue is working to advance transparency.
At GreenBlue, we know conferences. We’ve presented at dozens of them. Attended countless. We’ve produced over twenty of our own. All this experience has led to one major conclusion: the conference experience is far from perfected. There’s room for improvement. That’s why we’re excited about SPC Advance. SPC Advance is our answer to the mundane conference experience. Ever been to a conference where your attention span is spent after the keynote speaker? Seen folks pretending to pay attention while checking email on their tablet? Or the folks that actually catch a nap during the presentations?
It’s not rocket science – the average attention span of an adult is 30 minutes. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” SPC Advance has been specifically designed to keep attendees involved. We’ve found ways to pack an amazing amount of interaction into three days. SPC Advance kicks off with boots-on-the-ground tours of waste recovery operations and facilities of leading sustainable businesses, so that you don’t have to sit and be told what’s going on – you get to experience it.
After that? Workshops. Generously sized networking lunches and breaks. The average length of presentations? 20 minutes. And to bring it all home, SPC Advance follows two days of tours, workshops, presentations, and activities with meaningful working sessions, allowing attendees to react and interact with each other to find tactical ways to put ideas and learnings into action.
SPC Advance also presents an element that seems to be unjustly frowned upon by some events: fun. We think it’s okay to have fun at a packaging conference. That’s why we’ve added organized group exercise opportunities, from yoga to a jog through Minneapolis’s scenic parks. Got a bit of self confidence? Join Anne Bedarf for a hula hoop dancing workshop during the welcome reception. Need liquid courage? Attend the pub crawl and experience the local libations from some of the Twin Cities’ renowned microbreweries.
We know that conferences shouldn’t be about sitting in a chair and being talked at. They should be about making meaningful connections, re-energizing your passion for sustainability, and leaving with memorable ideas that translate to actionable outcomes.
So check out the schedule, and come join us at the Millennium Hotel in downtown Minneapolis for SPC Advance, September 9-11 2014. We promise you won’t be disappointed.
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. A typical American is sedentary for 21 hours a day. An estimated 86% of Americans sit all day at work. Research shows that if people sat 3 hours less a day, it would add 2 years to the average life expectancy.
2. One gram of protein from bovine meat requires about 112 litres (~30 gal) of water. This figure increases to about 139 litres (37 gal) of water per gram of protein from nuts, and down to about 19 litres (5 gal) of water per gram of protein from pulses (grain legumes). Pair these foods with the options below and start to see your water footprint soar.
3. Microorganisms surround us. In the relatively desolate atmosphere at 1,000 feet, every cubic meter of air contains about a thousand microbes. Closer to the ground, that number increases to about 100,000, and on every square centimeter of human skin, its about 10 million. A teaspoon of dirt contains 50 billion microbes..
4. World Health Organization’s (WHO) new findings show that poor air quality is responsible for 7 million deaths a year – one in eight total deaths worldwide. The Western Pacific and South East Asian regions bear most of the burden.
5. The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that foodborne illnesses have decreased by over 40% from 2002. Among the outbreaks that were traceable, restaurants accounted for nearly twice as many as outbreaks as private homes. Outbreaks with the largest average numbers of illness were found to occur in group settings such as prisons, catered events, and schools. *Earth Day Bonus:August 20 was Earth Overshoot Day in 2013. It marked the approximate date our resource consumption for 2013 exceeded the planet’s ability to replenish it. It happened on about August 22 in 2012, September 22 in 2003, and on October 21 in 1993 (about a month earlier every decade). If we continue at this rate, Earth Day 2052 could also be Earth Overshoot Day.
With the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Rivanna River just down the road from the office, Charlottesville provides GreenBlue with a great natural setting for a sustainability organization. GreenBlue staff work daily to help make businesses and products more sustainable, and we are well equipped with the knowledge, expertise, and research to make this happen. But each year on April 22, we like to remind ourselves of the reason we do what we do, and spend Earth Day celebrating our planet and the protection of its natural environment.
While we are thrilled to see the annual excitement today, we think it’s important to treat every day like “Earth Day.” April 21, 2014: A typical day in the life of a GreenBlue staffer:
“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.
Sappi Fine Paper is a leading member in the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s Forest Product Working Group. As a North American producer of coated fine and release papers, as well as dissolving wood pulp and market kraft pulp, Sappi sells its various paper products to customers all over the world, while simultaneously maintaining a steady environmentally-friendly reputation within the forest products industry.
Sappi has made many recent sustainability advancements and capital investments at its Somerset Mill, where they manufacture coated free sheet graphic paper, grease-proof packaging paper and bleached kraft pulp; recent initiatives include improvements to the mill’s lime kiln and working closely with Summit Natural Gas to bring a natural gas pipeline to Skowhegan, Maine, that will service the mill and 17 local communities. However, the public will most easily relate to their work surrounding the Gambo hydroelectric facility; a project that has been underway since 2009 in Westbrook, Maine.
Brad Goulet, Sappi Hydro Manager/Utilities Engineer, and Richard Curtis of the Presumpscot Regional Land Trust (PRLT) worked together to create appropriate public access to the Presumpscot River. While Sappi was required by their license for the Gambo hydroelectric facility to create access, the opportunity to work in conjunction with the Land Trust enabled Sappi to enhance existing trails at the Historic Oriental Powder Mill Complex and Cumberland Oxford Canal.
The Gambo Project resulted in a beautiful nature trail connecting to the PRLT trails, convenient fishing access, and a location for kayakers and canoers to portage between the upstream Gambo Pond and the downstream river reach. Along the Presumpscot River, Sappi now has many public access initiatives underway that will allow the local Maine community to better enjoy their surrounding environment.
Presumpscot River
“Working with the Presumpscot Regional Land Trust to accomplish these results, was a true collaborative effort,” said Brad Goulet. “Fostering a relationship between Sappi and such an important land conservation organization ensured that the land will be used for appropriate recreational purposes for years to come.”
Check out Sappi’s Presumpscot River blog before visiting the area, as Sappi regularly provides educational updates on the area including lake levels, river flows, and consequential water safety rules. Learn more about Sappi’s broad range of environmental efforts by reading their 2013 Sustainability Report or by downloading their infographic on Water Use in the Paper Industry.
As a follow up to our recent SPC Spring Conference, I’d like to share some thoughts on the big picture trends I see happening in the sustainability industry today.
The focus on sustainability within companies is shifting. Sustainability has matured and is being embedded in new ways. In the past, sustainable packaging was often considered the gateway to sustainability; the first focus of many sustainability initiatives. While sustainable packaging still plays a role in a company’s larger corporate responsibility initiatives, there is a difference in the “job” of sustainable packaging versus the larger “job” of sustainability in organizations.
