Sustainable Packaging

 Sustainable:Adj. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level: sustainable fusion reactions. + Ecology (esp. of development, exploitation, or agriculture) conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources. + able to be upheld or defended: sustainable definitions of good educational practice. – sustainability n. ecology.

So reads The Oxford American College Dictionary. This “sustainability” term used in packaged goods is the latest in an ongoing effort to define what I call optimized packaging. In the 1980’s we began with the three R’s, reduce, recycle, reuse. The recycling symbology was defined, debated, re-defined, debated, and finally implemented by the society of plastics institute or SPI. The objective was to identify plastic types to aid in the new wave of plastics recycling. Soon they were referred to as good numbers or bad numbers based on recycling rates, facts, myths, erroneous media reports, and misinformation. PVC is bad, so bad they banned its use throughout Europe. PET is good, easily recycled and useful in the recycling stream.

Then came the 1990’s and here come the government regulators, sure to cause confusion, completely ignore experts in the field, and do what is best for the rest of us at a high cost with little or no positive impact. They called it Rates and Dates. Establishing government guidelines for how much packaging would be reduced per package and by when. Washington Bureaucrats’ would have a field day debating the dangers of this evil they called packaging, and by gosh they were going to straighten these nasty packaged good companies out. Eventually, and fortunately, Washington discovered tobacco and the packaging crisis went away.

Reality is sometimes hard to find in today’s world. Debate takes place over the definition of the word “is”, truths are lies, lies are truths, it’s a mixed up messed up muddled up world except for LoLa. Fortunately for us there is one common truth in packaging and the consumer packaged goods market, and that truth is money. This financial reality identifies waste and punished those who choose to ignore it. No need for a Government mandates here, those who waste will eventually be pushed out of the market due to financial stress and strain. Their products will be too costly or their margins too tiny to remain a sustainable enterprise – there’s that word again.

The problem with regulatory mandates and government do good programs is that they are often times political ploys designed to have the appearance of doing “something”. The recycling symbology on plastic packages was an excellent start that helped enable the easy identification of plastic resins for separation for subsequent recycling or disposal. This was the work of the plastics industry aimed at a long term goal of recycling as much plastic as possible. The government picked up on this and immediately began work to mandate the plastic coding on all packaging. In the end, the industry beat them to it and legislation was never required to make this happen. The plastics industry was being proactive and responsible in self regulating this event.

“Rates and Dates” was the government’s term for reducing packaging weight and content. At that time I was working for one of the big consumer packaged goods companies which had a department set up to deal with this regulatory boondoggle. It was required that each business unit provide this newly formed department with the plastic content of the primary packages followed by a plan on how they would reduce that content by a predetermined amount established by the Washington bureaucrats. It was suggested that we look at the entire packaging “system” as opposed to only evaluating the primary container. No, that was not what they wanted; it was only the primary container they were after. So we lightened packages, spent millions of dollars on new tooling only to beef up secondary packaging systems to avoid package failure during the distribution cycle. Ultimately these types of programs became net loss when the full spectrum of the package system is identified and evaluated from a cost and performance perspective. The consumers were ultimately left with inferior primary packages with compromised functionality. Thankfully, rates and dates died a rapid death.

Perhaps it was the frustration of dealing with regulatory missteps that brought this concept to light, but however it emerged, the market responded as it always does by rewarding the best ideas. The concept is simple. Provide consumers with the best package for a product that delivers superior in home performance, product protection, distribution wherewithal, and full packaging optimization. That is from the product manufacturing efficiencies; which include automated product filling, packaging, secondary packing, palletizing, warehousing, transportation, distribution, retail handling and shelving, secondary packaging disposal, consumer purchase, consumption, and finally disposal/recycling. This is the full life cycle of the packaging; everything has a cost to it and must be balanced proportionally. This is packaging optimization.

The latest entry into the world of environmental packaging is the Sustainability effort. Unlike the previous forays, generally driven by special interest groups or government, this is a market driven effort. That’s right; it is all about dollars and cents. The good news is that the focus is broad and encompasses all areas related to packaging, the entire packaging system from start to finish. The opportunity in secondary packaging is to eliminate as much material as possible while still providing an effective means to deliver product undamaged to the retailer. This non consumer value added packaging is the most obvious opportunity to reduce. Why? Because the ultimate consumer has no concern with how the product made it from manufacture to the retail, just that is does in one piece, undamaged and as pristine as it did leaving the manufacturers production line.

Secondary packaging provides the consumer of packaged products no realized end value. That is, of course, assuming the product arrived on shelf in acceptable condition to that consumer. Therefore, the secondary packaging offers the manufacturer an opportunity for real source reduction of materials by minimizing the secondary system. Further, disposal of these secondary materials at retail takes time, costs money and adds no value at this stage of the product delivery cycle.