Packaging Digest

Sustainable packaging: supply-chain collaboration does matter

Is there a disconnect between who can and should be responsible and accountable for packaging sustainability? Consumers see brand owners and retailers as the face of packaging, and therefore consumers often look to them to provide information about and take responsibility for environmental impacts. Yet brand owners and retailers may have direct control over as little as 5 percent of the environmental impacts of packaging and only indirect control over the other 95 percent.

Brand owners and retailers can and do drive improvement through the packaging supply chain by the packaging-design and material-specification decisions they make. However, while these decisions can alter (positively or negatively) upstream impacts related to resource extraction and use, as well as downstream impacts related to end-of-life management, they have far less influence on the operation and production practices of substrate manufacturers and packaging converters. These operations account for a significant proportion of a packaging system’s carbon footprint or other operational emissions. So how can brand owners and retailers further influence supply-chain operations so they are better able to respond to consumer and stakeholder inquiries?

First, retailers and brand owners should understand that where materials are sourced and where packaging is manufactured influence the sustainability characteristics of that packaging. For example, while burning fuels to produce packaging materials contributes to global climate change everywhere, the fossil fuel mix used in one region may vary dramatically from another and result in significantly different climate impacts..

Labor practices well regulated and managed in developed countries may be unregulated in developing economies. Second, sustainability impacts us locally and globally, depending upon the process. For instance, extracting oil and mining coal to produce fuels results in acute local impacts on soil erosion, biodiversity and land use, in contrast to the global scale of impacts associated with the combustion of those fuels. While global impacts garner a lot of widespread attention, it’s often the acute issues at a local scale that can pose significant and immediate risks to business operations.

The geographic influences on sustainability issues need to be recognized and companies should be prepared to address them. In most cases, it requires the collaboration of their supply chains to do so. For brand owners and retailers, this starts but shouldn’t end with the packaging converter. Converters also control only a fraction of the packaging production process. But converters can involve their suppliers in setting strategic packaging sustainability goals. As collaborative goals are established, retailers and brand owners should work with supply-chain partners to select a set of metrics to establish baseline performance and measurement progress toward collaborative goals.

From goal setting to data collection and implementation, supply-chain collaboration is important in managing and communicating about packaging sustainability.