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How Complete Is Your Sustainability Vision?
September 20, 2008 By: Mark Arzoumanian Official Board MarketsHarry Epstein, vice president/innovation, HAVI Global Solutions, Downers Grove, Ill., enjoys his vacations. But he’s not good at planning them. Fortunately, his wife is a great organizer of their trips. Epstein calls her skill “backcasting” and at Packaging Strategies’ Sustainable Packaging Forum, held last week in Denver, he described in detail how this skill could help packaging companies develop a long-term, innovative approach to sustainability. HAVI is a package research, design and development firm.
Epstein told the 375 attendees that the best way to approach the sustainability movement is with a five-year vision. You have to ask, “Where are we going to be?”
“If you know where you want to be, you know where you will go,” he states. Using backcasting techniques you can map out a cost-effective sustainability program for the future.
What does sustainability mean for package design? Cost savings, for one. But it’s important that packaging providers use these “sustainability savings” and apply them to other technologies that will cost more down the road. In addition, designers must think proactively and holistically.
“Trend analysis suggests that energy costs will increase,” Epstein says. “Waste to energy will be a part of the future. In addition, landfill use will not be an option.”
He adds that if you’re going to build a sustainability vision, you need to factor in:
•Customer wants;
•Brand owner and retailer wants; and
•Government regulations.
Another point Epstein stressed during his talk was that paperboard packaging converters should establish empowering alliances with their suppliers (coating providers, for example). Doing this gives converters a competitive edge, allowing them to gain new (or more) business that otherwise might never have materialized.
Just What Is Sustainability?
A lot of paperboard packaging converters read about sustainability seminars that have been cropping up with greater regularity in the past couple of years and ask themselves: What is sustainability really all about and why should I be concerned?
In an effort to clear the air, Richard Heinberg, fellow, Post Carbon Institute, Sebastopol, Calif., keynoted the Sustainable Packaging Forum in Denver by highlighting “Five Axioms of Sustainability” that take a holistic look at the topic and will help clarify why this topic isn’t going to fade away. It is quickly becoming a “cost of doing business” issue. They are:
•A society that continues to use resources unsustainably will collapse;
•Population growth and/or growth in rates of consumption of resources can’t be sustained;
•To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to that of natural replenishment;
•To be sustainable, the use of nonrenewable resources must be declining at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of depletion; and
•Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.
“What does all this mean?,” he asks. “First, sustainability is not an option. Second, local sourcing of materials beats global sourcing. Third, packaging must not be ‘waste.’ Finally, you must look for fossil fuel inputs and reduce them continually.”
