Tag: sustainable materials management

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EPA’s Sustainable Materials Management goals align with SPC’s goals

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 4.40.02 PMThe EPA has just released their new Sustainable Materials Management Program (SMM) Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2017 -2022. We think it’s a great plan and look forward to working with EPA to achieve their goals.
There are three main strategic priorities. They are:
1.)   The built environment — conserve materials and develop community resiliency to climate change through improvements to construction, maintenance, and end-of-life management of our nation’s roads, buildings, and infrastructure
2.)   Sustainable food management —focus on reducing food loss and waste
3.)   Sustainable packaging —increase the quantity and quality of materials recovered from municipal solid waste and develop critically important collection and processing infrastructure. (provide link or attach document here)
SPC’s food waste and sustainable packaging priorities link very closely with EPA’s.
In the food waste category, EPA’s Action Area 1 is:
Develop an infrastructure to support alternatives to landfill disposal of wasted food.
IMG_3402
The SPC has been presenting recently on food and packaging waste composting strategies. We believe that composting packaging and food together will allow more effective collection of waste in food service situations and provide a next life option for products like single serve coffee pods. We believe that SPC’s role is to insure that as we develop organic infrastructure to capture food waste, we must insure that packaging is included. Current trends indicate that composting infrastructure will continue to grow while packaging will be excluded .This could limit the effectiveness of capturing food waste and reaching the landfill diversion goals.
How2RecycleLogo(R)SmallContamination by non-compostable packaging is a valid concern for composters. The SPC’s consumer facing How2Compost Label will be a great tool to help fight contamination and provide important composting education. SPC is working with BPI and member companies to develop the How2Compost label, an offshoot of the successful How2Recycle Label.
We recently completed a project in Charlotte, NC funded by EPA Region 4 where the goals of the project were two-fold: 1) to promote food and packaging waste (F&PW) recovery, and 2) to generate a list of lessons learned and fundamental guidance to stimulate much broader and more extensive organics and packaging composting programs nationwide.
This final report forms the framework for scaling up composting for a variety of sectors through lessons learned, best practices, and accessible guidance.
In the sustainable packaging arena, EPA’s Action Area 1 is about: Convening and partnerships: infrastructure.
One of the ideas that came out of the wrap up session at SPC Advance 2015 was Sego Jackson’s (City of Seattle) suggestion to help the MRFs get the materials they want and need. This conversation came shortly after the New York Times article “Reign of Recycling” ignited a flurry of conversations about our recycling infrastructure. Scott Mouw (North Carolina DENR) recently shared information at a Resource Recycling Conference that showed that even in established recycling markets we still aren’t getting the materials that are available for collection. From the total of what is available in specific markets for PET, Mixed Paper, and HDPE, more is going in the waste stream than is being recycled. These are easy materials to collect and recycle with established markets.
Accordingly, the How2Recycle team will be developing a campaign for “getting the MRFs what they want and need”. The idea is that we try and get brands to put the How2Recycle label on what we think are “obvious” desired materials including PET bottles, cereal boxes, laundry detergent bottles, soup cans, etc.
We are looking forward to working with our members and EPA to meet their goals in sustainable food management and sustainable packaging.
 
 

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Preview Of EPA’s Strategic Outlook For Sustainable Materials Management For 2017-2022

During the SPC Advance day 2 session that explored the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s outlook on sustainable materials management, Deputy Director of EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, Kathleen Salyer, was able to provide SPC members with a preview of their forthcoming strategies for 2017-2022.
The top three priorities for EPA’s sustainable materials management strategy will be 1) the built environment, 2) sustainable foods management, and 3) sustainable packaging.
Within sustainable foods management and sustainable packaging, EPA hopes to convene and support partnerships around developing infrastructure to handle food waste and end-of-life packaging. More specifically, for sustainable foods management, EPA will promote opportunities to reduce food waste by approaching these opportunities via the EPA’s ownFood Recovery Hierarchy and Food Recovery Summit. Additionally, improving and standardizing measurement of wasted food will be a priority at the agency in coming years.
For sustainable packaging in particular, EPA wants to improve research, data, and policies around sustainable packaging in order to increase information about recovery and material production. The EPA hopes that this improved data will drive industry progress in sustainable materials management, since the need for data is often a strong influence in sustainability decision making.
The 2017-2022 EPA strategy is especially exciting for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, since SPC initiatives likeregional composting projects and the How2Compost label will directly align with these critical action areas.
EPA strongly encourages interested parties to provide feedback on this strategic outlook over the forthcoming months. She invites SPC members and anyone else to provide comments to salyer.kathleen@epa.gov.

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GreenBlue

Jammin’ for Data – working to increase material transparency

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?

  1. More data (e.g. product ingredient lists, data on health impacts)
  2. Better tools (e.g. databases, assessment methodologies)
  3. Consumer demand for information
  4. Better data standardization (e.g. standards for data and meta-data reporting)
  5. 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?

  1. Greater industry cooperation around proprietary information
  2. Cross industry collaboration (e.g., more activities like this data jam)
  3. Improved consumer education
  4. More funding
  5. 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.

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Sustainable Materials Management: Externalized Packaging Material Stewardship

“How can packaging become sustainable when end of life treatment is externalized to municipalities?” This was a tweet I sent out during a session on solid waste handling at the recent Sustainable Packaging Coalition spring conference in Seattle, Washington. Industry, local governments, environmental organizations, educators and citizens invest a great deal of effort and money to improve recycling rates and access to recycling services across the United States. My own organization, GreenBlue, is dedicated to sustainable materials management (SMM), which focuses on using materials wisely, eliminating toxicity, and recovering more value from the material waste stream. Yet, the solutions to comprehensive sustainable material management remain elusive, here and globally.

MRF Tipping Floor

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GreenBlue Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Moving Beyond the Easy Wins – Integrating Sustainability Into Our Core Business Strategies

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.

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Eliminate Toxicity Recover More Sustainability Tools Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Part 4: Life Cycle Assessment – A Blending of Art and Science.

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