Reduce or Recycle: What's Better for the Environment?
Stonyfield Farm is a pioneer and respected leader in the world of sustainable business, . A model for any company truly concern with CSR practices. Yet their yogurt cups are non-recyclable, what do these green gurus know that we don’t? Since the mid 1980’s, Stonyfield Farm has been conscious of their packages’ environmental impact. Initially focusing on recyclability, Stonyfield Farm eventually realized that there are many other factors which influence the environmental impact of a package throughout its life cycle.
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by the Tellus Institute suggests that "...the lightest-weight package, per unit of delivered end product, is generally the lowest-impact product". Based on this philosophy, Stonyfield Farm uses polypropylene (#5) plastic. This material provides the same structural integrity as HDPE #2 plastic, but with thinner walls. Stonyfield Farm’s current quart containers weight just 60% of the old-style packaging. Since many municipalities do not recycle wide mouth containers even if they are made of HDPE #2 plastic (e.g. yogurt tubs), recyclability of the package material is a moot point in this particular case. Furthermore, recycling rates in America hover around a merger 30% and that’s being optimistic!
Recycling is vital, as is reducing the overall amount of material used in each package. So what is better, reducing the amount of material used to manufacture your packaging or making that packaging recyclable? What are some specific examples of decisions you have made when accounting for the package life cycle? Was there particular emphasis on one of the life cycle steps - manufacturing, use, re-use, recycling and/or disposal?
* indicates an article that was submitted directly to this Web site by the supplier, and was not handled by the Greener Package editorial staff.
Greener Package may share your contact information with our sponsors, as detailed in our Privacy Policy. Greener Package will not share your information with a sponsor whose content you have not reviewed. The members of the Advisory Board and Expert Network do not review, approve or endorse advertisements on this Web site.
I think the move that Stonyfield Farm made in their packaging is just the paradigm breaking solution the market needs.
Pre-cycling (the removal of material from the package so it never sees the recycle stream) is a very valuable tool in sustainability. One that many companies are not taking advantage of. Many of the packaging technologies we present to clients are focused on precycled concepts. When considering the amount of energy removed from the life cycle of the product and the pounds of material kept out of the recycle stream altogether, precycling could be one of the best tools companies have at their disposal to take advantage of "low hanging fruit" in their endeavor to introduce more sustainable versions of their current packaging.
What Stonyfield Farm understands is that with injection molded PP, you can control the manufacturing process better yielding a much thinner walled package.
All too often though, in our presentations of some of our concepts, too much concern is placed on injection molded PP due to the published statistics on PP recycling. The problem with this concern is 2 fold:
1. The PP stream is lower because there are significantly more dynamic paradigms of packaging using other materials (HDPE liquid laundry bottles for example) than there are PP package paradigms. That will simply change when more PP package concepts are introduced. PP is just as recycelable as many of these other materials.
2. The other problem is the value placed on recycling. To date, even though the data suggests improvement in recycling in the U.S., overall the percentage is still way too low on plastics that are actually making it into the recycle stream.
So it would seem to me that precycling should be an area of focus for introduction of new sustainable package concepts.
Tom,
This is a common question, but it's not possible to have an answer for it.
Is recyclable or likely-to-be-recycled material better than non-recyclable? In most cases. Is lesser packaging material better than more? In most cases. Is recyclable better than less packaging? It's impossible to say without full knowledge of the context and doing the necessary (life cycle) assessment to put all the pieces together. You will get a different answer in different contexts and to try to make a categorical rule will likely lead you astray as often as it will help.
In fact, in some cases it may be heavier weight packaging or packaging of a less recycled material that is the best option because we must also consider how well it protects the product, the impacts of which producing can be tens to thousands fold greater than for the packaging. Packaging, as we all know, is a complicated system that serves a very important function. We need to consider all aspects of that system and also the system that it is protecting to understand what will really be a "green" packaging in that context. Stoneyfield's container may be very good for their yoghurt, but I wouldn't suggest they try to sell eggs in it and making it more recyclable or lighter weight won't make it a greener eggs packaging.
That being said, in Stoneyfield's case they made sure the necessary homework was done (by some former colleagues of mine at Michigan's CSS, http://tinyurl.com/cxwzaj) to understand all the trade-offs involved in choosing among the available materials and feasible design options. In this case, it pointed toward a container with a less-likely-to-be recycled (a more accurate term for PP than unrecyclable) material. The analysis also suggested that they would help the environment (and their bottom line) by not including a plastic overcap above the foil tops on the 8oz containers, which many others in the industry have followed. However, the cap is still there on the 32oz size, even though the impacts of just producing the packaging would be much less if they got rid of it. The reason being that at that size, it's necessary to protect the product, which if wasted has much more impact on the environment than the jug.
There are certainly many case studies that would indicate a different type of conclusion. If we turn these case study results into rules-of-thumb and stop thinking critically about the systems in question, we may be right in some cases, but will be wrong in many others.
Jon Dettling, www.ecointesys.com
Very informative and trustworthy blog. Please keep updating with great posts like this one. I have booked marked your site and am about to email it to a few friends of mine that I know would enjoy reading.
Post new comment