Tag: sustainable packaging

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Sustainable Packaging Coalition

SustPack 2016 explores how business can be made sustainable

For two and a half days, professionals from across the sustainable packaging value chain, as well as academia, and government officials met at SustPack 2016 to discuss the most pressing sustainable packaging issues. SustPack 2016 hosted over 430 delegates, a significant increase from last year’s conference, which was the first collaboration between the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and Smithers Pira.
Browse through our SustPack 2016 photo gallery
20160412_082118SustPack was held at McCormick Place, Chicago from April 11-13th. Chicago was the perfect setting for a conference that acknowledges the challenges of the present, but looks to a brighter future through collaboration and innovation. SustPack brings together many key players across the packaging value chain, from manufacturers to brands and MRFs to discuss the details of their businesses and how to create a more sustainable future.
This year’s agenda was the biggest to date. Over 50 presenters spoke about some of the issues at the forefront of sustainable packaging. The focus on ‘Business Made Sustainable’ led to a lot of interesting discussions on how different brands integrated sustainability into the core of their business. Representatives from leading brands such as Target, SC Johnson, Mars, Ikea, Wegmans, Mars, Nestle USA, Keurig Green Mountain and many more were in attendance.
A few of the major themes that came out of this year’s conference were recycling, exciting design innovations, how to promote composting, flexible packaging, and the circular economy. Attendees can browse through what others were saying in Chicago by using #SustPack16 on Twitter.
IMG_2788In addition to the presentations, networking and breakout sessions, SustPack 2016 offered attendees interactive workshops focused on building your brand’s sustainable promise and strengthening brand trust with consumers; disruptive design method for sustainable innovation and social change; and our popular Essentials of Sustainable Packaging Course. Attendees also were given exclusive behind-the-scenes tours at some of Chicago’s most sustainable businesses, such as the Method Soap Factory, Goose Island Brewery, and more.
We would like to thank everybody who attended SustPack and helped make this the most successful conference yet! We look forward to seeing SPC members at SPC Advance in Portland, Oregon on September 19-21 and we look forward to seeing everyone at SustPack 2017!

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Sustainable Packaging Coalition

A Unique Approach to Understanding Consumers

When hundreds of packaging professionals are gathered at an event together, a discussion surrounding consumers is inevitable. It is interesting that we as professionals in the industry make so many assumptions about consumer understanding of sustainability attributes of packages but rarely do we talk to consumers about their assumptions. And when we do bring the general public together for surveys or tests, they are typically addressed with leading questions in an unfamiliar office space designed to get answers and move on to the next person.
Wednesday morning at SUSTPACK, Cara Cosentino of Watch Me Think exemplified how videos of consumer interactions with packages are great tools for better industry understanding of the public. Cosentino mentioned that Watch Me Think started as a way for companies to get to know their consumers. Those of us in the packaging industry are all “consumers” too, so it’s odd to think that we might not be able to, but grasping consumers’ thoughts is a constant struggle. Using consumer videos, Watch Me Think has created a comfortable atmosphere for people to express their opinions honestly and effectively.
Cosentino showed the audience glimpses of consumers (or “thinkers” as Watch Me Think likes to call them) interacting with everyday packages and explaining their feelings of sustainable packaging in general. The organization strives to be an authentic look at consumers and her examples certainly showed this authenticity. A few people in the video mentioned that they prefer reusable and recyclable packages and that sustainability is on their mind when grabbing packages off the shelf; however, a few opened up and said environmental efforts have “absolutely no effect on products I purchase.”  These consumers mentioned that money and convenience influence their purchasing decisions much more than sustainability factors. Regardless of the purchasing practices, all of the consumers expressed frustration with over-packaging. E-commerce, toy, and pharmaceutical packaging were among the categories mentioned guilty of over-packaging.
In the SPC’s How2Recycle Label Program we often struggle with consumer understanding, as we are creating on-package recycling labels that will be displayed on millions of commonly purchased packages. It would be interesting to see how consumers feel about the different terminology used in How2Recycle and how well they understand and appreciate seeing the many different label types (Widely Recycled, Check Locally, Store Drop-off, and Not Yet Recycled). Extensive consumer testing was done during the development of How2Recycle, but now that the label is commonly found on store shelves it would be fascinating to see real-time videos of consumers interacting with it!
In the meantime, we appreciate all consumer feedback through our online survey at how2recycle.info. Let us know what you think of the program!

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Member Spotlight

SPC Member Spotlight: The Dow Chemical Company

“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.

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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
 
 

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Recover More Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Meditating on Sustainable Materials Management

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.