In the last of my four-part series, I’ll describe the new tertiary packaging model in COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment) which is being released on October 7, 2013.
There is no better way to understand something than to tear it down and rebuild it. At least that’s my motto…sometimes. When it came to building the tertiary packaging model for COMPASS® the research was interesting but it wasn’t until I began to fundamentally unravel several types of pallets that I realized all the thought that goes into designing them to meet the specified use scenarios. In the process, I collected and dismantled block type and stringer type pallets, the kind used to move groceries and construction materials in the U.S., and some specialized pallets used for shipping large office equipment. The goal was to understand the configuration, the nailing pattern, the number and type of fasteners used, the identity of wood types, and the overall weight of the pallet. In the process, I amassed a pile of lumber, some softwood species and some hardwood species, a lot of bent and rusted nails and calloused hands. This was the beginning of the parallel projects—on one hand life cycle data modeling and software development for COMPASS, and on the other hand, utilizing the lumber for creative up-cycling efforts (see A Wood Pallet’s Artful Journey).
The first effort (LCA – Life Cycle Assessment – data modeling and software development for COMPASS) led to collaboration with faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s industry leadership committee (ILC) on transport packaging, and other experts in tertiary packaging. The result was the inclusion of tertiary packaging components into the screening LCA workflow of COMPASS. The new additions expand the packaging system to include primary packages inside secondary shippers with supporting components, and a unit count of these assemblies on a pallet or other B2B delivery format with supporting components such as wraps, straps and cushioning. In effect, the packaging portrayed in the image below plus all the intermediary transportation needed to move packaged goods from manufacture to the retail shelf can now be captured in COMPASS.
Designing Sustainability Into Packaging
The packaging design process, as with other design exercises, starts with a need and moves to ideation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an ideal tool to allow exploration of different concepts to fulfill the identified need, and select the choice that best fits the sustainability priorities of the company and the brand. Through the process, one can quantify environmental impacts for impact categories such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, fossil fuel consumption, water consumption, human health, aquatic toxicity and others. Having this kind of information during the early design steps expands the ability of design professionals to include environmental impacts of a package design into the decision-making process along with the more traditional considerations like cost, performance, aesthetic and regulatory parameters. The result is a whole-system perspective that can produce packages that are optimized for a specific set of criteria to be more sustainable.
COMPASS is a streamlined LCA software specifically tailored for packaging design evaluation. It is an effective tool to help make informed design decisions that are aligned with the company’s greater sustainability goals. Leading brands, logistics companies, consultancies, and academic institutions all use COMPASS to build better packaging for today’s marketplace.
New changes in the packaging community related to environmental performance reporting are driving industry toward consistent B2B data sharing and enhanced transparency about the materials and processes used to develop both package and product. In the packaging community, these initiatives include the Global Protocol for Packaging Sustainability (GPPS) and the GS1 reporting standard. The GPPS contains a set of performance indicators for packaging that are now incorporated in the GS1 barcode system and will soon allow easy sharing of key environmental indicator data in the GPPS between trading partners. At stake are such lofty and core sustainability principles as embedding systems thinking into package and product design, benchmarking and performance tracking, and data transparency for B2B supply chain communication. On this path, companies will need a simple way to calculate the impacts associated with their packages for value chain disclosure, and COMPASS can help.
With this expanded model, one can compare primary packaging alternatives starting at the concept stage, include the secondary containment options, factor in tertiary packaging components such as pallets, slip sheets, edge cushion, wraps and straps, and account for all intermediate transportation legs needed to move the finished product to a retail chain. Detailed information such as this can enhance the ability of businesses to incorporate sustainability parameters effectively into operations and incrementally move the overall SOP towards a new norm—one that can lead to an enhanced materials management economy: a sustainable economy.
Such incremental operational improvements are essential to fulfill the vision of sustainable materials management (SMM) where materials are used in a carefully considered and wise manner, where toxicity and adverse effects are minimized or eliminated by design, and where material recovery is optimized so that the materials that are collected can fulfill their full life cycle potential by being available for new packaging and products. Life cycle assessment is the only comprehensive method that can help businesses glean environmental impacts associated with their processes, products, and services. Its widespread usage into everyday practice is essential to measuring and tracking progress to be able to make the necessary course corrections on the sustainability journey towards an industrial system with greater environmental stewardship.
Visit https://design-compass.org or contact me at info@design-compass.org to learn more about LCA or COMPASS. Also, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @amistryman
Category: Recover More
In this part three of a four part series, I’d like to explore the creative side of the life cycle of some pallets. There is a growing urban hobbyists movement that uses the pallet to make basic yet creative products; check out 35 Creative Ways To Recycle Wooden Pallets for examples. Approaching the problem from a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) perspective, however, I became intrigued by the relatively low public profile tertiary packages (sometimes called transport packaging) play in comparison to the flashier on-the-shelf primary packages. Secondary and tertiary packages understandably play the supporting role to the charismatic primary packages that are designed to get our attention. Yet without the supporting cast, the lead role would scarcely be very effective.
As the product owner of GreenBlue’s COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment), an LCA tool tailored for packaging design evaluation and improvement, I was interested in developing a comprehensive model that applies LCA to quantify the environmental burdens associated with the entire packaging system needed to deliver a product to the store shelf, including all the intermediate steps. Along with the requisite research, software development, data modeling, and validation steps, I also embarked on a journey to learn about the materials that made up the ubiquitous wood pallet. I was interested in the potential of the materials—not mere reuse or recycle, but potentially up-cycling into truly long lived products. There is a lot of hardwood used in pallets made in the U.S. South East and I wanted to explore the potential of the material with its built-in limitations. I had just completed construction of my own Three Beagle Workshop, and this challenge was perfect for my interest in multimedia art made with materials from found objects. And, I found pallets almost everywhere!
The first task was to tear down a few pallets and see what made them work. It seemed simple enough a task, but it proved be more difficult than expected. You see, pallets, even the expendable types, are very well constructed and able to withstand a great deal of force. Muscle power wasn’t enough to produce usable pieces of lumber so I employed power tools and decided to cut the nails instead of pulling them out to separate the various parts. This worked well and I soon had a decent pile of wood parts of fairly uniform, though worn, looking lumber. The next, more creative part of the job was to envision the potential locked within the limited configuration of the boards and planks. I was intent on producing a product that did not resemble a pallet as the example in the above link, and still retained the distinct characters of wood that had lived a completely different life. This meant working with the dents, the knots, and most of all lumber with nails in them!
The first couple of products still had remnants of the pallet. Here is one 48″x48″ 2-way entry stringer type pallet reconfigured into a potting table:
And a sturdy European block pallet (EPAL) that had some mass to it. It became the base for a small wood shed to complement the backyard fire pit. Both of these items were functional and long-lived, yet they reveal the pallet origins, so back to the drawing board. Both pallets were destined to be hauled away in the municipal solid waste (MSW) and disposed at the landfill or at best turned into mulch.
Any woodworker knows the havoc nails in wood can cause on hand and power tools alike. But, I was determined, and with a bit of planning and patience, success! Here is the result of patience and working with the limitation imposed by the materials at hand. In the end, the success was more rewarding because the final product proudly exhibited the scars borne of the past life of the lumber. And, from an aesthetic perspective, the piece below reveals the grace that comes from passage of time and weathering. See for yourself:
Of course, there was a pile of spare parts that couldn’t be thrown away. When the opportunity to design a display for a collection of native bird painting arose, they were just perfect. With a bit of imagination those bits and pieces from several pallets were reborn as a gallery display for Virginia bird paintings.
This creative process of tearing down wooden pallets paralleled the LCA model development process for COMPASS, and invariably influenced the nuances therein. In the next and final article, we will examine the depth of the tertiary packaging model in COMPASS.
Until then, if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on Twitter at @amistryman or comment below.
Tertiary Packaging And Compass Continued…
Let’s start part two of our four-part series with some basic facts about packaging in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). In 2011, the overall recovery of packaging material was at approximately 51% with corrugated board and steel leading the charge in terms of highest material recovery. The overall rate is deceiving because the highly recovered materials such as steel and corrugated board skew the average as seen in the graphs below (2013, US EPA 2011 Facts and Figures Fact Sheet) and in this great infographic from the U.S. EPA.
In this post, I’d like to focus on the types of packaging that work in the background to bring the huge assortment of products we buy (fresh and packaged food, cosmetics, detergent, medicine, car parts, clothing, shoes, sporting goods, etc. ) to the shops we frequent. These packages have no fancy font, color, imagery or shape to catch your eye. In fact, many of them are plain brown corrugated boxes that make up the bulk of secondary packages and are recovered at a rate of about 91%. This recovered fiber is reused to make many types of paper products including new corrugated boxes. On the tertiary packaging front, wood plays a prominent role in the form of pallets and crates. Pallets are the workhorses of industrial packaging and come in a large variety of configurations to accommodate the various industrial specifications.
Companies such as CHEP manage many wood pallet configurations as a pooled resource with relatively long life span. These pallets are used and repaired many times to maximize the investment in material, cost, and design. Pallets also come in expendable variety that are typically used only once or a few times and then discarded. It is the expendable variety that we see in the back of grocery stores or the big box stores. These pallets sometimes find their way into the MSW and are included in the data above as “wood.”
Every year, 1.9 billion wooden pallets are in circulation in the United States, transporting a variety of goods.[1] Depending on the way the pallets are manufactured and managed, their life span and possibly their fate at end of useful life varies. Managed or pooled pallets are repaired multiple times to extend the life of the asset. They are sturdier to begin with to accommodate a relatively longer life. They may be broken down into parts to be reused to repair other pallets in the pool. On the other hand, expendable pallets may not be as sturdy as reusable types. The material investment is not managed as an asset and hence has a higher probability of disposal via landfill or incineration.
So, where do all the pallets go?
- Recycle – Wood from pallets is often mulched and used as landscape material. Some pallets are creatively recycled into useful household craft. See next article for examples from the Three Beagle Workshop.
- Reuse – pallets are collected, repaired, and sold in a secondary market.
- Incinerate – some fraction of wood pallets end up at waste to energy (WtE) facilities where the materials are incinerated and the resultant energy is used for heat or electricity generation
- Dispose – to landfill
In the next installment, we will look at pallets in a more creative light and see what happens to some of pallets in circulation.
[1] 2013, IFCO. http://palletsbyifco.com/recycling/, accessed 19 August 2013.
Tertiary Packaging and COMPASS®
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition began in 2005 with the Definition of Sustainable Packaging that emphasizes the responsible use of materials for packaging using a life-cycle approach. A great deal of the effort has been focused on improving the primary packages—the ones we take home that physically contain the product companies are selling. Innovations in packaging design and materials have continued at a steady pace to adapt to changing market trends, consumer preferences, regulations, and waste reduction efforts. These changes are quite visible on the shelves of our favorite shops. With that said, there are other kinds of packaging that provide crucial services behind the scenes that shoppers may not think about but are vital in delivering products to our favorite shops’ shelves.
This packaging is sometimes referred to as secondary and tertiary packaging and is used for business-to-business (B2B) transactions. A common example of secondary package is the ubiquitous brown corrugated box. A wood pallet, the kind we see behind the grocery store or at big box stores, exemplifies a tertiary package. Both secondary and tertiary packaging may be used to collate goods for delivery. Each type of package is developed to serve a specific service with the goal of delivering the product safely and intact from the manufacturer to the end user. The image below illustrates the different packages and their general role beginning with the wine bottle as the primary package, providing direct protection and marketing appeal for the product, the box with its foam cushion as the secondary package, protecting the larger grouping of the product, and the pallet as the tertiary package, providing the support necessary for safe transport of the product to its destination.
Of course, this is a simplified illustration and there are many other variables that need to be accounted for in order to deliver the product to the shop shelf. Factors that influence the types and combination of packaging employed may include things like product weight and fragility, spoilage consideration, stacking strength, temperature and weather, transport method, etc. These complexities go into the ultimate design of the system, and sustainability outcomes need to be included in the design flow to assess the impact of delivering the product. In order to improve the system one must be able to quantify the implications of everything that goes into making the items that make up the whole delivery system. In the illustration above, this includes all the materials (glass, metal, paperboard, plastics, wood etc.), the processes needed to make the packaging from the materials, any supplemental components needed such as plastic wrap or straps, and the overall implications to transportation.
The discipline of life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a convenient tool that is increasingly used by designers and companies to develop a model that quantifies the overall environmental burdens associated with product and service delivery. Quantification of environmental impacts can help improve the choices made during the design process to positively impact the corporate sustainability strategy. GreenBlue’s COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment) is an LCA tool tailored for packaging design evaluation and improvement. Historically, it’s been used for optimizing the primary packaging. But, this October, COMPASS will start to include a new model to quantify the entire system, to include both single use and reusable tertiary packaging.
In the next installment, we will examine packaging in the solid waste stream, in particular secondary and tertiary packaging and what happens to those materials.
Last week about a thousand people attended the Together for a Better Planet – Sustainability Forum in Mexico City. Jeff Wooster, GreenBlue board member, and I were among them. The event presented opportunities for companies to showcase products and services with the potential to reduce environmental burdens of various industrial necessities. There were displays of solar panels, wind turbines, electric delivery vehicles, commercial lighting, packaging, agricultural production, etc. The hope with all of this innovation and effort is to allow for the continuation of business while lowering the associated environmental impact over time.
There were discussions on various topics, and one that Jeff and I participated in involved the sustainability of packaging. The panel discussion remained fairly high level and offered a systems perspective for packaged goods. There was much discussion about the recovery of materials from the waste stream and how the bulk of packaging materials end up in landfill or open dumps in Mexico. The small amount of material sorting that occurs in Mexico follows two paths:
Trash collection service is offered in a relatively small part of this enormous and populous city. A crew of half a dozen or more men pick through materials of interest as the truck moves down the street. Keep in mind that all the stuff is commingled trash – wet organic and food waste, paper and board, plastics, metals, glass and all sorts of other refuse. The men work fast and efficiently, and surprisingly in a jovial manner, yet many of them are working with their bare hands to pick the valuable materials.
The second pathway of material recovery occurs at the landfills or dumps, and is an informal mechanism powered by poverty and necessity. Here pickers, the poorest among the poor, risk injury, sickness, and indignity to earn pennies. They pick valuable materials for recycling in an informal material economy. The work is menial, dirty, unsanitary, unsafe, and often occurs under harsh weather conditions. The recovered materials, the fruits of the pickers long hours of labor, probably yields a substandard market price. This is because the materials were collected from a dump of mixed contaminated source; hence the quality of those materials is generally poor. Many high value materials such a s paper and board are rendered useless for many recycled applications due to being wet and adherence of foreign matter. After all of this effort, these materials are destined for lower performance usage and much of the embedded energy – both base materials and human energy – is lost.
I presented the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s How2Recycle label that provides a clear and consistent means to communicate actions needed for proper disposal of packaging to optimize recovery. In Mexico, where recycling infrastructure is lacking and the ethic of material stewardship is underdeveloped, such communication combined with packaging waste bring sites can engage the citizens to do their part in closing the material loop. Engaging the citizens in material stewardship has long-term benefits for a more sustainable world, and can move society away from a use and throw model to a sustainable materials management (SMM) model where technical materials flow back into the cycle to be reborn as new packaging or product components.
Outlining the story of a company’s stewardship in combination with the How2Recycle recycling label is an opportunity to show the company’s determination to make sustainable material management a priority. It can help reinforce the critical role citizens play in closing the loop on packaging material recovery, and develop the recycling ethic in citizens, particularly children, that can bear long-term fruits in developing a sustainable material economy.
A brief anecdote from the streets of Mexico City:
One man’s trash is another man’s _________.
After the conference I moved from the posh Polanco area where the event was held to a hotel in the historic district. As I made my way from the Isabel la Catolica metro station, I saw a homeless man with natty dreads and messy clothing moving towards me. Such apparitions intrigue me and this one did not disappoint. The man had a faraway look in his eyes and he did not see me, or anyone else, and I might guess the throng scarcely noticed him.
This man’s manner was of great interest to me. He was simultaneously of the immediate environs yet somehow outside it. The man meandered through the flow of humanity while slowly and meditatively popping the tiny bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap. He wasn’t popping the bubbles for apparent amusement or passing of time. His treatment of the packaging material was akin to one engaged in reciting prayer with the rosary beads or other meditative equivalent. He slipped through the random moving bodies about him seemingly aware only of his mumblings and the systematic row-by-row popping of the bubbles.
I observed the man as he moved peacefully through the pandemonium about him. I might say a bit of his peace transferred to me and helped me navigate the rush hour shoulder-to- shoulder metro traffic.
In “At the Intersection of Standards and Sustainability,” published in the March/April 2013 issue of Standardization News, editor in chief Maryann Gorman wrote, “… modern development — manufacturing, infrastructure projects, building construction and so on — takes place in a vast and interconnected world of systems. Global supply chains, regional regulatory schemes and the emergence of integrated systems like intelligent highways and buildings mean that most materials are produced within overlapping economic, social, regulatory, environmental and material requirements. And it is at this intersection that standards and sustainability meet.”
For the packaging community, standardization for measurement of sustainability performance started its journey in 2009 with the release of GreenBlue’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition®-produced “Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework©.” The Framework synthesized the vast body of measurement literature into a core set of indicators relevant to the packaging supply chain. Then in 2011, the Consumer Goods Forum picked up this work and condensed the effort into the Global Protocol for Packaging Sustainability (GPPS 2.0), which provides a common language for packaging sustainability related measurements. Presently, the set of environmental attributes and life cycle indicators within GPPS are poised to be released into a global GS1 standard that will provide a platform for submitting and the sharing environmental measurements between producers and retailers in a consistent and unified manner.
The GS1 GDS-GPP Packaging Sustainability Standard is in review and comments phase and is scheduled for release this summer. With the rollout of this additional layer into GS1 standard platform, a producer can release sustainability-related data via the GS1 global trade item number (GTIN) barcode system, thus allowing buyers to gain access to those data without the producer having to fulfill multiple requests from buyers from different retailers for the same information. Such central data sharing will allow ease of communication along the supply chain and with luck, facilitate overall transparency, benchmarking, and tracking progress for product categories.
One clarification: the GS1 standard only standardizes the reporting and sharing of sustainability indicators related to a package based on its assigned barcode. It does not standardize the methods by which the measurements are calculated. That is a different conversation. Stay tuned for the standard’s release date this summer.
This article by GreenBlue Senior Manager Minal Mistry appeared in this month’s issue of Packaging Digest, which features a monthly column by GreenBlue staff on packaging sustainability. Read the original article.
As I was sitting at a local coffee shop on a nice summer afternoon, I overheard a conversation about “all the waste in society” at another table. What stuck with me was a comment that waste was “merely an externality” of the modern on-the-go lifestyle. The notion occupied me on the walk back to the office as it relates to my work with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, particularly to the optimization of packaging design and life-cycle analysis. From a design perspective, where does good design end and where do externalities begin?
In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit that is not fully captured in the price of a good or service and is incurred by a party who was neither the buyer nor the seller. An externality can also be viewed as an unforeseen or unintended consequence accompanying a process or activity. Of course, there are positive and negative externalities that hold true for packaging.
Often, a design captures the specified parameters for cost, performance and aesthetics, yet these parameters may not be sufficient to minimize the negative externalities associated with packaging. Improving the positives while diminishing the negatives is the art of design optimization.
For packaging, externalities exist in terms of litter, municipal solid waste (MSW) collection and processing costs, pollution and habitat destruction resulting from material sourcing as we examine the entire life cycle of the material flow. However, are these truly externalities associated with the modern world? The definition of externalities draws attention to unforeseen or unintended consequences, and that is where the nexus of optimization occurs. However, all of these impacts associated with the life cycle of a package or product are already known within the industrial supply network. So, setting aside the price discussion, the question becomes: Are these truly unforeseen or unintended outcomes?
In the U.S., the latest MSW data suggest that 38 percent of aluminum, 31 percent of glass and 14 percent of plastic packaging is recovered. Knowing these statistics going into the design optimization process, can we truly attribute the remaining discarded portions that end up in landfills as an externality? One can argue the systemic inefficiency of material flow cannot be viewed as an externality. However, it does represent significant economic, environmental and social burdens that are externalized to members of the wider community. The significance of a negative externality may change over time, yet the principle that bad design perpetuates significant negative external costs seems sound. Some of these costs are a result of market failures, while others can be attributed to the misalignment of design and other areas such as end-of-life material reclamation.
Within the packaging community, several efforts are attempting to address these issues and some are involving the social sector through direct citizen participation or policy mechanisms. The solution to bridging the gap between the packaging materials placed in the market and the subsequent recovery of those materials at a systems level resides in the engagement of all the relevant actors and in the art of optimization. Design optimization has a role in capturing the systemic needs upfront. All the while, industry and society must work together to improve the overall system. At its core, this is the spirit of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. The challenge is to come together with this spirit to honestly tackle tough issues, like externalities, and come to solutions that serve the best interests of the whole.
