 | Jill Hanegraaf |
Location
Oshkosh, wi, usa
Role
Packaging Materials SupplierJob Title
Marketing - Business DevelopmentCompany
Curwood, Inc.Comments
* 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.
Plastic Scrap
Do you purchase just monolayer materials or will you take multilayer barrier materials both flexible and rigid?
Medical Packaging
The Walmart Scorecard will tell you how you score within the Walmart system. The Walmart Package Modeling software does allow you to compare packages to understand which package scores better in the Walmart system. However, depending on the packaging material components, the Walmart Scorecard can be inaccurate as to the true sustainability of the package. Particularly when it comes to plastic packaging as there are many materials used in flexible and rigid plastic packaging that are just not material choices in the Scorecard. The reason being, there is not publicly available LCA data on many polymers. However the basic 7R's of Scorecard (Remove Packaging, Reduce Packaging, Reuse Packaging, Use Renewable Packaging, Recycle Packaging, Revenue and Read) are a great framework to creating more sustainable packaging. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition recently released their "Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework" to help measure progress toward sustainable packaging. This is a great resource. I would suggest you check out their website www.sustainablepackaging.org. The Greener Package is also a great resource for information and discussion on sustainable packaging. Third party LCA review processes are a great way to understand the sustainability of your product. Be careful, however, is using the LCA comparatively unless the methodology and inputs were consistent.
LCA Software
What methodology, process and potentially software you use depends to some degree on what type of packaging you are looking to analyze. The Walmart Scorecard is not really meant to be an LCA tool and is a inflexible in its material choices. You cannot override or add materials. For analyzing some materials, the Walmart Scorecard would not be the best tool. Also, Compass does not take into account freight, if I recall correctly, and therefore you are missing a large piece of the puzzle. As the others have written here transparency is critical. I am seeing so many tools that use a bit different weighting or methodology which is concerning because there are companies using this type of analysis to compare themselves to others, when the analysis process is different. Hence the need for complete transparency.
PVC vs. PET
PET is definitely a more sustainable choice of material than PVC. The "Chloride" in PVC is what is not considered "environmentally friendly". PVC does release carcinogens when incinerated and can to some degree when processed. Also, more CPG's choose to send their in-plant packaging trim waste to be incinerated in Waste-to-Energy (WTE) plants as a means of being more sustainable and not sending this material to landfills. WTE plants can only accept a small amount of PVC through their system. When PVC burns it creates HCL which can increase corrosion in the burning units. Also, they need to monitor the amount of PVC running through the system to be certain their air emissions systems can filter out any carcinogens. Even though PET semi-rigid packaging formats, such as clamshells, are not currently recycled, these materials can at least contain Post Consumer Recycled (PCR) PET. Here at Curwood, we have been working with PCR PET in our films. It is FDA approved for food contact and is repolymerized down to the base polymer, so it processes the same as virgin PET for us. It is also a drop in on packaging equipment currently running PET materials.