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Kill The Cliché

If people repeat something long enough, they start believing it. “Corrugated’s a commodity” has been a catchy mantra among some of your customers for a long time — so long that it has evolved into a cliché. Clichés are like a crooked politician’s promises — destined to be broken.

Take another look at this issue’s cover. What you see there is a corrugated solution designed to make everyone’s life easier. The people who receive this package by UPS or FedEx don’t have to struggle with a commodity to gain access to the new wheelchair inside it. The chair’s manufacturers saw to that — they and their corrugated supplier.

The result of their collaboration is a testament to the value of universal design. It’s universal because it makes everyone’s life easier, from the mountain-climbing customer you see on our cover to the people in the supply chain responsible for getting the wheelchair to him.
Virgil Adkins is one of those responsible people. He’s a design engineer at Anchor Bay Packaging, the company that helped Independence Technology make packaging a hero in this month’s cover story. The reason I know the commodity cliché is passing is that companies like Anchor Bay are killing it. The notion that returnable plastic containers are the only environmentally conscious packaging alternative is dying too. Adkins and his company supply the automotive industry, traditionally one of the biggest users of plastic returnables.

What’s happening is, while managing the return of these things is getting tougher, your industry is making corrugated and folding carton solutions a more justifiable alternative.
“In the past five years, automotive was real heavy into returnable plastic containers,” Adkins says. “It’s starting to creep back toward expendables because of the logistics of trying to coordinate those returns. It’s starting to become a nightmare for them.”

Adkins notes that his company is ISO 14001 compliant, and that it and its clients recycle. ISO 14001 is a voluntary international standard that provides a specification for a complete and effective environmental management system (EMS). As a specification standard, it can be used by your customers as an audit tool, to evaluate whether you have a complete EMS in place. According to Adkins, corrugated’s recyclability is being rediscovered by wheelchair manufacturers and automakers alike. These customers want to make paperboard packaging work for them.

If you saw last month’s “Customer Voice” column in this magazine, you read Roger Huff’s account of how Ford Motor Co. is reaching out to paperboard packaging suppliers to help the company live up to its commitment to sustainable mobility. That concept has the same roots as universal design. They’re both dedicated to making it easier for people to live their lives.

This magazine is dedicated to helping you give life to a new cliché: “Packaging’s a solution.” It may not be as pithy as “Corrugated’s a commodity,” but this industry is poised to make it stick around for good.