“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.
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has a long history of inspiring projects and initiatives ranging from environmental campaigns like their Care to Recycle campaign, to global healthcare work with Operation Smile. A recent Johnson & Johnson initiative that caught our attention is Project Phoenix, a program established in 2009 that helps recycling cooperatives in Brazil improve their operational processes, document their policies and develop a stronger social infrastructure.
Category: GreenBlue
At GreenBlue, we all do our best to “walk the sustainability walk” in our daily lives at home and at the office. In the past we have even had intra-staff challenges that involved sustainability actions like bringing our own containers to coffee shops and lunch spots for take-out food, eating more fruits and vegetables, collecting compostable waste in the office, and spending more time outside on a daily basis.
We spend our professional lives thinking about sustainability, but that doesn’t stop when we walk out our office door. We do our best to host sustainable conferences, too. What does that mean? First, we look for hotels that offer their own suite of sustainable practices, such as not laundering sheets and towels daily unless requested. We prefer to locate our meetings in a city center that is available by public transportation and allows attendees to walk to restaurants, shops, and sites. Our instructions to the hotel’s catering staff might also be seen as a bit strict sometimes: we require that water is served in pitchers or coolers with reusable glassware, cream and sugar are served in bowls instead of individual packets, coffee and tea are provided in ceramic cups with spoons instead of disposable cups and stirrers, sustainable seafood choices and local products are specified wherever possible…and the list goes on.
With the 2014 SPC Spring Conference just around the corner, March 25-27, everyone at GreenBlue is understandably busy, but nevertheless incredibly excited about what we have planned for our 10th annual event. We are thrilled to be heading to Seattle for the event, as the well-known green city will provide a perfect backdrop for an informational and productive gathering for the hundreds of packaging and sustainability professionals attending the conference.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with a few of our speakers about what they’re most looking forward to at #SPC2014 in Seattle. Here are some of their thoughts:
SPC’s Spring Conference agenda is teeming with thought provoking panels and outstanding presenters, and it is an event for everyone. In classic fashion, here is my top 5 list and playbook for anyone planning to attend or thinking of attending:
- Take a tour – they are perfect small group networking opportunities. You may also learn a thing or two (learning may not apply to the pub crawl).
- Let the emails pile up – the flash talk format is going to bring the heat. Put off the latest calendar invite and carry the conversations into the networking breaks.
- Find out the relationship between Garbage Burritos, Mariachi Bands, and recycling rates with Sego Jackson.
- Wake up early and go to bed late – from early morning yoga sessions to dinner and dialogue groups, there is never a dull moment at an SPC conference. Make the most of the time we have together in Seattle.
- Take advantage of the amazing resources and opportunities made possible by our sponsors, Starbucks, Microsoft, REI, PepsiCo, HAVI Global Solutions, General Mills, and Dow Chemical Company, and amplified by our Seattle location.
Sustainability is fundamentally a social issue. Without people envisioning a different state of affairs, coming together, engaging, discussing, learning, and sharing, there would be very little positive change along sustainable materials management. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s annual Spring Conference on March 25-27 in Seattle, WA is loaded with activities conducive to this type of collaboration with colleagues from across the full packaging value chain.
Tours like the CHEP pallet service center tour allow time for casual discussion and networking.
On the social side of sustainability, the event provides superb networking outlets. Start the day with light networking after early morning mind-body sustainability yoga sessions. Follow that up with exclusive behind the scenes small group tours, then attend conference sessions and network over coffee breaks. The event agenda is loaded with material management topics ranging from sustainable forestry and sourcing, measurement of impacts, practical guidance from the field on communicating sustainability efforts, and wide ranging discussions on various facets of effective material recovery upon use. Round out the day with Dinner and Dialogue, a deep dive small group discussion led by GreenBlue staff or members of the SPC Executive Committee. These sessions are very popular and provide opportunities for networking in a smaller forum.
Let me extend a personal invitation to the conference and join me in events I will lead: early morning yoga, Fun and Games with Packaging Sustainability, and Dinner and Dialogue. I look forward to meeting you in Seattle.
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Seahawks & Mariners & You, Oh My!
What do the Seahawks, Mariners, and GreenBlue have in common?
Sustainable packaging (and Seattle, of course).
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition Spring 2014 Conference is heading to the home city of Super Bowl and sustainability champion, the Seattle Seahawks, this March 25 – 27th. While most of the celebration in Seattle last night and today surrounds their Super Bowl win over the Denver Broncos, sustainability professionals are celebrating the initiatives the team has undertaken in the realm of sustainability, especially as one of the founding members of the Green Sports Alliance.
The SPC is excited to be holding our conference at the home of the Seahawks and Mariners, Green Sports Alliance members often recognized for their commitment to 
We hope you will join us at the Conference. In the words of the Seahawks, come be the 12th man, and have an unparalleled impact on the game of sustainable packaging.
Explore the agenda and register for the SPC Spring Conference at http://conference.sustainablepackaging.org. Take advantage of the early bird registration rate, which ends this Wednesday, February 5th.
The recently released Aqueduct tool from the World Resources Institute is an excellent example of the effective visual presentation of complex data. Aqueduct measures and maps water risk, and the project recently completed new research that “scores water-related risks facing 180 countries and 100 river basins. This is the first national-level data of its kind, evaluating competition for available water supplies, annual and seasonal supply variability, flood occurrence, and drought severity.”
We at GreenBlue appreciate the science behind the tool, as well as its interactive design and visual impact. Check out the tool here: http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct
“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.
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.
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Top Five Fun Facts: November
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.
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In a survey conducted by the Bradley Corporation, 70% of respondents admitted to rinsing hands with water without the use of soap after using a public restroom. Roughly 75% of women participants claimed that they always washed their hands after using a public restroom compared to only 60% of men.
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An estimated 46 million turkeys will be cooked this holiday season. While many Thanksgiving feasters enjoy their turkey fried, every year, deep-fryer fires are
responsible for around five deaths, 60 injuries, the destruction of roughly 900 homes, and more than $15 million in property damage. -
According to a recent post from The Economist, Singapore is the best place to do business and new companies can be formed in as little as 2 ½ days. The post also notes that wealthier parts of the world shoulder the lightest regulatory burden when it comes to conducting business.
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Over 60,000 Veterans are homeless on any given night. Pay tribute to the Veterans that served their country, and consider helping end veteran homelessness by 2015.
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We are in the thick of No-Shave-November, a month long cancer awareness event that encourages participants to put down our razors, embrace our hair, and donate the money typically spent on shaving to cancer research and awareness. The teams registered with the American Cancer Society have a total of 515 participants, and have raised over $996,000. There is still time to get involved!
