As it happens, the many scenarios suggested above are all LCA issues. There is a common assumption that the global supply chain and packaging transport is the major issue in GHG emissions due to packaging. But think again. Transport by container ship is MUCH more efficient than transport via rail, which is again MUCH more efficient than transport via truck. And, the total fraction of the US GHG inventory due to commercial transport is only about 10% of the total.

What does this mean? If you are shipping packaging materials across the Pacific it has little impact. On the other hand, if you are trucking goods across the nation it can matter-- especially if your packaging is designed to ship air. Where Walmart is making a difference in its packaging supply chain is in the design of packaging to permit more units to fit on a pallet and more pallets in a truck. It is all about cube utilization.

Yes, plastic often has a better LCA than paper-- but the real opportunity is the development of packaging that makes the overall product LCA look better, including the product shipping. The package that fails in efficiency is the package that has the highest environmental impact.

Great post Sean, and an excellent response Rita. As a US manufacturer/printer I'm tempted to start in about the massive carbon footprint of overseas transportation, however I have cannot argue that ocean transportation is a significant contributor to the LCA of a product. I've done quite a bit of research on this and, as it turns out Ocean transportation (per container) is relatively efficient. Rita is correct, intercontinental (ground) transportation has a much greater impact on carbon footprint, and these ships are becoming more and more efficient every day. Some, for example have experimented with large (enormous) sails outfitted to the ships, often increasing efficiency two-fold! Again, as a U.S. manufacturer I'd like to see everyone buy 'local'- I think there are lot's of other good reasons to do so, but carbon footprint isn't one of them.

I'm a bit concerned to read comments like "If you are shipping packaging materials across the Pacific it has little impact" and “ocean transportation (per container) is relatively efficient.".

A few points here ...

-Containers do not mysteriously appear on the water and leap from the port of arrival to their final destination. Trucking is almost always involved for haulage between the berths and wherever they come from or go to (sometimes rail is involved but inevitably a majority of movements involve trucking). Of course, this isn't including the stevedoring, etc

-Whenever you remove, reduce or eliminate trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic surface movement of goods you reduce or eliminate an environmental impact. It may not be as significant as a commensurate distance travelled via truck transport but it is an impact negated nonetheless

-I haven't come across a consumer product OEM yet with a supply chain that wraps around the planet that ships exclusively by water ... almost always air cargo shipping is involved in some proportion of the business and some products ship predominately via air (high tech electronics, etc)
-Consider in some models how much stock on hand you must keep in the chain to account for this extended lead time scenario ... in some of these models the longer the lead time the more inventory which means more "stuff" and a commensurate impact including scrap and obsolescence

The point here is not that ocean transport or multi-national/multi-regional supply chains are bad ... I make my living in this space. The point is WHERE you source packaging and WHERE you elect to package goods within the context of a supply chain is relevant to environmental impact. If you can source locally and capture the footprint variance it's a win outside the material spec.

In specific regards to the intl scenario, if you postpone your packaging and reduce the footprint of the goods travelling across the pond you reduce transit instances and most likely scrap and obsolescence in region with a more agile supply chain solution

This is where I would like to see a bit more dialogue. Packaging strategy within a supply chain context and how firms can start thinking of other ways to reduce environmental impact outside the BOM

The question(s) posed are similar to those I am hearing and responding to for a wide variety of supply chain situations. The common thread running through all these is that to realistically assess the impact of a product/package supply chain, one is inevitably driven to examine all the important elements and their interactions. Certainly there is high visibility to package, pallet, truck, container, etc. packing efficiency. Sometimes greater geographic distance is not beneficial and sometimes there are other environmental aspects that overcome the common wisdom that further is always worse, everything else being equal. That last caveat is a dangerous one, since upon a closer look we discover that everything else is rarely equal.

In a brief presentation I made a year ago at The Packaging Summit on the potential impact of Middle East plastics and packaging materials on the US and global market, I made the point that longer shipping distances could be much more than offset by a combination of lower extraction environmental costs, by more efficient and innovative process technology and a high reliance on cleaner and more efficient natural gas for electric and plant energy production.

A number of companies are proving that what we have thought of as largely equivalent and interchangeable raw or semi-finished materials are anything but that. Through investment in world-leading technology and a relentless focus on driving out variation, waste and unnecessary energy consumption, the very best operations can offer higher performing materials and packaging components that offer converters and end users the potential to significantly reduce the footprint of finished packages compared to conventionally produced traditional materials. Even after ocean transport.

For me, BOM and the rest of the supply chain are inextricably linked, because all materials are NOT created equal. We are largely constrained today by a dearth of of recent, public and transparent data (even on industry averages) to analyze comparative package footprints. This is the weakness and the potential danger of some of the less rigorous tools out there today. One of the risks is that it is easy to conclude that we must treat all sources of a material type as essentially equivalent. They aren't, and many of the best-in-class producers are in the process of gathering and verifying the data to prove what kinds of advantages they can offer. Some of those companies are in North America and will be able to advantageously deliver to domestic users as well as users in other countries. In other cases, the lowest footprint materials or components offering equivalent or even superior performance to conventional approaches will come from overseas.

Companies can make good decisions when they are based on a broad and deep systems-based look at the specifics of the situation, and where good data are available. Smart behaviors like that will reward innovative thinking and investment and will result in a constantly improving set of supply chain systems being made available.

Should value chain participants work hard to improve the area in which they principally play and have the most skills to apply? Absolutely, but with good knowledge and in the context of how what they do impacts the rest of the chain. Will there be fits and starts and failed experiments? Of course we will see these, but when experimentation flourishes and artificial skewing is prevented, we can count on seeing the emergence of superior approaches that will offer real and meaningful improvements, and at all stages of the chain.

Hello Timothy

Excellent dialogue. In particular I'd like to focus on a couple of your comments ...

"Companies can make good decisions when they are based on a broad and deep systems-based look at the specifics of the situation, and where good data are available."

Expanding our data set and analysis to assess origin foot-printing of materials (middle east vs us refineries and extruders, etc) and quantifying distance travelled impact (truck to rail to truck to ocean to truck vs localized trucking, etc) gives us a more thorough impact analysis. As the title of your post states "Hard to separate elements when taking systems look", it is harder but not impossible and some of the tools and data sets out there are being used improperly when making decisions about materials. Partly because the lack of understanding of or the methodology used in the LCA.

If people are using the LCA metrics in the Wal-Mart scorecard to determine paper vs plastic or one resin or substrate or another when considering sourcing repercussions from any region other than the US, they are skewing their analysis.

Not only is distance traveled not considered but the LCA metrics are specific to a region not general to the worldwide packaging industry.

I think we can polish this up a bit as a sustainable packaging community. There is data out there and we need to facilitate the sharing of that data whether it means transport mode impact or the varying LCA data behind the BOM from different regions.

Awesome. I hope we get more people posting to this string because this dialogue needs more debate, participants and due diligence.

How strange does local production for local markets sound? Don’t confuse this approach with the 2007 publication of the 100-Mile Diet, although in principle there are similarities.

There are a number of production/manufacturing models used around the globe to get a product to market, just-in-time, semi-finished, co-packed, out-sourced, drop-shipped and the list goes on. To what end? Maximize profit.

Sean’s request to “talk about distance traveled from source to consumption” of paper for instance is a subject I can speak on with confidence. The product is the aseptic carton and there are only two significant players in the world, Tetra Pak and SIG Combibloc.

As the seasoned monopoly players race to own markets, deployment of goods through the supply chain delivers its own set of issues. That is unless one works backwards from consumer to manufacturer when designing the value proposition in order to dovetail with environmental considerations, which both systems are good examples of.

Owing to the differences in forming the package from either a continuous roll fed system such as Tetra Pak or preformed sleeves as is the case with SIG Combibloc the transportation efficiency is influenced by three variables. Distance traveled, weight and space requirements (translated into the number of trucks). The weight of an unfilled 1-litre carton varies between 20 to 28.5 grams for the respective systems and is of little impact to the equation.

Both suppliers can boast high efficiencies transporting unfilled cartons. Tetra Pak calculated that to transport 1 million 1-litre empty cylindrical containers of glass or metal would require 52 semi-trailers compared to 2 for Tetra Pak’s carton reels. One reel contains the equivalent of 5,500 1-litre unformed cartons.

Here’s the difference. Tetra Pak has 43 converting facilities servicing their customers. SIG Combibloc on the other hand has 10 converting facilities which ultimately means incurring higher transportation costs. I would surmise that this is the reason why SIG Combibloc is lagging with only 19% global market share. Tetra Pak’s marketing strategy clearly demonstrates close proximity to accommodate local production. As a result the beverage market tends to remain local with little cross border raiding.

The advantage then rests with packaging formats that are delivered as semi-finished reel or sheet (flat) stock. Not surprising that flexible packaging is making a significant impression in the market place today.

And imagine what happens to the SIG Combibloc model and their marketing share when crude surpasses $100/barrel again ...

Imagine how painful it will be to procure EPS foam vs nested thermoform, molded pulp or Paperfoam.

Imagine how those extended supply chain models that wrap around the globe are impacted.

We may want to dig deeper and quantify the impact of WHERE we buy from and WHERE we pack out now while the luxury is performing environmental impact analysis to move closer to a sustainable solution before the fiscal constraints of the alternative drive everyone into a frenzy

Advantage to the forward thinkers who consider packaging within the context of sustainable supply chains

Great post Dean

Interesting discussion. I’m also curious about logistics at a level even more local: from filler to palletizer (or from depalletizer to repalletizer of mixed pallets). Has anyone catalogued:

1. the conveyance and logistics challenges that flow from the reduction of cartonage (or from moves to shrink-wrap bundles),
2. the alternatives for solving those challenges and
3. the costs of those alternatives?

--John Landrum, Director of Global Business Unit for Packaging and Material Handling, Intralox, LLC

John, when I was based in Shanghai with Tetra Pak I provided the Asian content to the “Package Appearance” project. Our mandate was to quantify at each handling point throughout the supply chain the type & severity of the damage caused to each individual pak under typical conditions, no mean task I can tell you.

In total three countries (China, France and UK) ran the pilots before deploying the global initiative. The Package Appearance project reported to top management and was strongly supported with their presence in the steering committee.

The supply chain was audited in reverse. That is from the customer’s shopping cart back to the filling/packaging machines. Our methodology was to inventory a number of plates at warehouses throughout the Shanghai area following a typical deliver run. Working from the last drop-off we then inspected each pallet, tray and then individual carton. The findings, of which I know all too well, having co-written the report, were detailed. Attention was paid to the location of the tray on the pallet as was the individual pak in the tray; the evaluation sheets were extremely specific. Damage characteristics were categorized and provided as a template to follow. No subjective assessments were to be made.

The findings concluded that the majority of the damage was a result of rough handing incurred from the shipping dock to final destination. Deploying the corrective actions were country specific and we worked with retailers and Tetra Pak market companies. It’s this last chapter that addresses your concerns. Pallatalization patterns were tested and configured for each size of pak, weight specific. That means the max height to stack a pallet was documented. The gauge of secondary tray board was specified as was the glue. Shrink wrap was specified and for Asia we even developed a specific board to resist moisture, rodents and retain its strength from a blend of Calcite and HDPE. Wooden pallets were even inspected and retained moisture levels were recorded. This was an extremely detailed initiative which I believe delivered results throughout the supply chain. The final word on this subject was “there is no single solution” but a tool box full of best practices.

Hope my words provide some inspiration.

Sean,
This is exactly the kind of questions we should be asking. Rita and the others add key insights too. The scorecards are tools that offer some insight to the material and general package. What we often fail to see is a good understanding of the supply chain and what is required to get the product from the point of manufacture to the point of purchase.

We (me included) tend to throw acronyms around that a good portion of the manufacturers have little to no knowledge of. LCA/LCI, ISTA, ASTM, FSC, SFI, PEFC...and the list goes on. Each program or process has good intentions and processes. But most of what I've seen over the past several years is a general lack of understanding of the supply chain's requirements.

An optimized package doesn't mean it’s in the lightest possible materials. The package needs to be designed as a system. How much does it weigh? How high will it be stacked? How many times will it be handled? Will it be in a container ship? How long at sea? Can the product help support the load? What time of year (seasonal temperature/humidity variations) will it shipped? Floor loaded or pallets? Machine or hand packaged? There are tons of questions that need to be asked before a package can be properly designed. Unfortunately, most of the time one of the areas that gets squeezed in the product's timeline is packaging. So we end up with the same old packaging design. What if there is a better "mousetrap"? Most of the time we don't have the capital, time or energy to push a new design uphill to get it implemented.

If we rely solely on one set of metrics or measurements we may miss some good opportunities. There may be times when adding material, although counterintuitive, makes sense and is the right thing to do. Beefing up a package to reduce damage may be more cost effective in the long run. Reduced damage, reduced handling, and more saleable product with better on-shelf availability, improved cube efficiency, more product on fewer trucks. These are all good things. None of these can be determined or evaluated by a single measurement or metric. The key is insight and understanding of what the supply chain requires and continuing to turn over every rock to drive out inefficiency anywhere we find it in the supply chain.

Indeed, Chet is really right.

We need to look at the full system in order to figure out how to make more sustainable packaging. With a few exceptions (cosmetics and bottled wine spring to mind) the environmental impact of the contents of a package vastly outweigh the environmental impacts of the package itself.

The implication is clear. Dematerilizing the package is only environmentally friendly as long as the primary function of the package (protecting and preserving its contents) is retained.

In no place is this more clear than in food packaging (about half of all packaging sold). The environmental impact on the farm are very high, and the amount of food that is wasted is very high (about 40% in the USA). Any kind of packaging and processing that reduces food waste has a positive environmental impact. Even single-serve items, with their high packaging content, are better than the average food cooked at home, because all of the item is eaten, and manufacturing losses are low. Compared to the typical restaurant-prepared food, single serve items are hugely more environmentally friendly, because restaurants typically throw out more than half the food they buy (all those health laws).

And Chet is right-- the product has to get to the consumer intact -- no matter the handling and climate it passes through. The packaging industry should be proud of the work it does to reduce losses in the products they protect.

Now if we could only get the word out...

There is no doubt that by understanding the setting/surroundings a product traverses a supply chain the higher probability the product will reach its destination unscathed. The correlation between rough handling and damages as I validated in the “Package Appearance” initiative can be translated, calculated and mitigated.

I like to site the example of transporting eggs. Why is it we see so few if any breakages? The egg shell is fragile; the secondary packaging is not excessively robust therefore the handlers have learned to handle the produce with care. A learned behavior!

I’ve seen product loaded on palettes skewered with slivers from wooden pallets, crushed product from over stacking, product compressed out of shape from too tight shrink wrap and the list goes on.

“Out of sight out of mind” and here we have the root cause to our problems, the combat zone. That distance between manufacturer and retailer that should be a seamless process to the shelf wants for a realist budget.

Unfortunately the cost of manufacturing also includes unique distribution costs which many marketeers overlook and then ballpark. There is a science to designing secondary packaging, vibration & compression tests to be conducted as well as moisture absorption rates. Not to mention optimized packing patterns to map.

The squeeze between manufacturer and retailer today for lowest cost manifests itself as packaging maladies’. The secondary packaging design phase suffers for a lack of funds and the outcome we all know too well. Secondary packaging needs to be addressed upfront, provided with a budget and then monitored for effectiveness per product launch. Retailer and manufacturer then have to educate their product handlers on best practices tailored to meet the supply chain. Is how I read this.