Is Pre-printing Carbon Footprints on Consumer Package a Sustainable Approach?
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- Green marketing
With the more environmental concerns today, there are coming more preprinting carbon footprint on the consumer package to show consumers how much CO2 is emitted.
I am just curious that this would or not create more environmental impacts due to the packaging printing and production processes. Because the amount of CO2 emitted from a same product would vary depending on how far and what methods the products are shipped to. So it can be different from place to place. This would cause more printing plates for one product. And may have to split the packaging prodcution runs if that products are shipped to various countries because of different figures of carbon footprint.
Please advise if there are sustainable guidelines on communicating this carbon footprints.
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Overall Impacts
Adam Pawlick
You do raise a good concern on whether or not adding printing to a packaged will negatively impact the sustainability of that package. I think you need to look at the overall impacts and the major drivers. If the package is already printed, you aren't adding a completely new step. You do add some more ink to the package so there is an impact there, overall though, that impact would be small compared the base materials, product inside the package, as well as all the transportation invovled with the primary materials, packaging materials, and distribution of the product.
If the package isn't already printed you are adding a completely new step to the process. This will have significantly more impact than just printing a little more. Again, you have to look at overall impact (do you have to send the package to a completely different facility to get printed or is it run on the same line, something else just has to be turned on).
Again, you also have to weigh the overal benefits of doing this. If, by adding this information, you can drive consumers to make "better" purchase decisions, you then can start to drive industry into changing how it manufactures in order to reduce its impact. If a labeling scheme could functionally force all manufacturers (a complete impossibility, but for discussion point we will pretent) to reduce their carbon footprints for every product by 10% in order to better compete for consumers then you have done way more good than harm in adding that label. This is what the proponents for this system claim, that this adds more data for consumers to make their purchase decisions, which in turn forces companies to compete in this area.
The larger, and more important issue, is that there is no way to really ensure that all companies, for all products, calculate their carbon footprint the same. Then we are just adding confusion to consumers and building mistrust between companies and consumers. It would be next to impossible for the FTC to verify all these new claims and the methodolgy used to calculate them across all products and all companies. This would mean consumers wouldn't be comparing apples to apples when looking at these labels.
Thanks Adam for your
kittw...Thanks Adam for your comments. In addition, there are some cases that there are multilingual labeled packages which are produced for various countries and sales channels. This will be affected that it needs specific figures of CF for each countries or each sale channels. So instead of pre-printing the package in a long production run and splited to different channels when needed, then it will have to separatedly preprinted for each channel. Hence, the printing plate or cylinder will have to be made specifically.
That could mean instead of having one stock of preprinted packaging for all channels, we may end up with different specific stock for each channel. Though all channels sharing the same package design label and barcode but will have to preprint different carbon footprint figures.
Not sure if this concern is rational or not.
Agreed
Adam Pawlick
I agree with you completely. Not only will different channels require different labels for language, but also for content (if you manufacture in Ohio your label to get across the U.S. will be very different than your label to get to Asia, assuming that transportation impacts are included in the label).
The larger issue at work with the different channels is cost. Without the labels you may be able to do a run of 1,000,000 units, so all your purchased good are identical. You get volume discount. You also only have maintain inventory for one item. If you distribute across 10 different countries all with specific language requirements (assuming even distribution) you are down to runs of 100,000 units, all with unique packaging to inventory, plus you have to maintain the inventory levels for 10 products rather than 1.
International Marketing Constraints
Imaginear
Great discussion.
After several years of learning Internet Marketing, I am now at the point of launching a few of my products. I build online brand management campaigns and this topic is a concern of mine. My concerns are the regional CF requirements for import. Japan is of primary interest. Where would i locate the CF sepc's for japan and or any other country?
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