“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.
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.
Resource recovery and revalorization seems to be just about the hottest topic in the packaging sustainability community these days. It’s hard to pick up any packaging publication – print or online – without some reference to the need to expand packaging recyclability, and the opportunities and challenges involved. GreenBlue’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition made sure to emphasize this important topic as we developed the agenda for our 2014 Spring Conference, with tours and sessions that highlight the newest developments in resource recovery and end of life management.
The Pacific Northwest region leads the country in recycling and composting. We recently talked with Conference speaker, Dick Lilly, Manager for Waste Prevention and Product Stewardship at Seattle Public Utilities, about Seattle’s cutting edge sustainability efforts, specifically its composting and recycling efforts. Seattle is the first U.S. city to require that all single-use food service packaging be either compostable or recyclable, helping the city move toward its goal of a zero waste future. Lilly explained that in this shift to using all compostable or recyclable packaging, the city holds meetings with restaurants and manufacturers regularly to discuss what does and doesn’t work, and what needs to happen to make these regulations more successful. “One things that I would applaud about the restaurant industry is that they have been tremendously innovative and have made a great effort to come up with new products. The industry has changed dramatically in terms of the products made today that will help restaurants move in the direction of more compostables or reusables and less disposables,” said Lilly.
I am sure all of us at one time or another have taken a walk down a nature trail and found a bit of trash that stood out among the plants or on the path. More often than not the 
item is recognized almost instantaneously by its color scheme, shape or material combination – its branding.
We may be irritated by the unsightliness, we may not give it a second thought and meditatively and instinctively pick up the litter for proper disposal later, or we may keep walking. This time of year in a deciduous wood with only brown dried leaves on the ground, even a small item may stand out. Among more urban landscape the litter might just be part of the environs along the roadside or highway entrance. We may scarcely notice it while zipping by in our automobiles. Yet litter as a collection of transactions is quite complex and the pathways that result in the deposited item in places other than the trash bin are many. The composition of the litter too is quite diverse and context specific.
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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.
