Sustainability Pays

Packaging sustainability initiatives increasingly are factoring into the buying decisions of today's consumers. But what's good for the environment isn't necessarily bad for the bottom line.

Private Label ⇨ Store Brands asked Rita Schenck, executive director of the Vashon Island, Wash.-based Institute for Environmental Research & Education, to pinpoint some financial positives associated with packaging sustainability initiatives. Here, she also offers some tips for increasing the success of such efforts and educating shoppers.

Private Label ⇨ Store Brands: How could sustainability initiatives aimed at store brand product packaging benefit not only the environment, but also the bottom line?

Rita Schenck: When we talk about more-sustainable packaging, more often than not, we're talking about less packaging. And less packaging translates directly into less cost, because generally the cost of packaging is linked to its volume or its mass. And so there's a high correlation between the mass of a product and its environmental performance — the more stuff you have, the more environmental impact you have.

Walmart's experience with their sustainable packaging initiative is that their biggest savings came from what they call cube utilization. They make packaging less bulky. It takes up less space on the pallet, and therefore, they get more items shipped with less air. And that translates directly into transportation savings.

Private Label ⇨ Store Brands: What types of practical questions do retailers and their product suppliers need to ask before taking any steps to increase a package's "sustainability quotient?"

Schenck: No matter what you do, you cannot afford to have packaging that fails. And the reason for that is that the environmental impact of the contents of the package is much greater — it's nine or 10 times greater than the environmental impact of the packaging itself. But if the packaging fails, all the [effort] from making the stuff inside is wasted.

Yes, we want to have lightweight packaging; we want to reduce our packaging. But what we really, really don't want to do is have packaging that fails.

The question you're going to have to ask vendors is what their failure rate is. And they should be tracking that because presumably those vendors will be taking the packaging and the contents back when it fails. So an important part of contracting is to specify failure rates.

Private Label ⇨ Store Brands: In what ways could retailers best communicate package sustainability efforts to potential and current shoppers?

Schenck: I think the opportunity for retailers is to educate them. … Sometimes when you use more packaging for food, the overall environmental impact actually is less. Particularly in cases like portion-control [packaging]. So if you buy the extra-giant package of potato chips and you only eat half of them, then you throw away not just the packaging, but all of the environmental impact of making the other half of the potato chips.

[Studies have shown that], depending on how you do your packaging, you can have 30 to 50 percent less overall impact because you may have more packaging, but you have less waste — less food waste. A good 30 percent of the food that we grow gets thrown away by consumers. So although it seems counterintuitive, the actual fact of the matter is that very often, single-serve sizes are the most environmentally friendly.

I think that there are opportunities for educating consumers, especially at the end of the aisle or when you're having food-tasting kinds of events. Or I think a great place to educate consumers is at the checkout stand, when people are waiting in line and they're kind of just standing around. I think that having storyboard kinds of information there is terrific, and there the retailer can tell a story. And retailers are really key to consumer education.

One of the things that is being developed and that people should be looking for in the next few years is an eco-label on packages … that will have information available through a smartphone. So you take a picture of the package and then you look on your smartphone to see its whole lifecycle impact — its carbon footprint, its water footprint.

There are also people who are trying to develop software that will use the picture of the packaging itself and then use recognition [technology to develop an] eco-profile, or what's called an environmental product declaration. ... And sometimes it will be divided into the environmental impact of the packaging, the impact of the food and the impact of the user.

This will be another opportunity to educate people about portion size, about the impact of going to and from the grocery store, which actually is a lot more environmental impact than all the food miles of the food transported.

Yes, we want to have lightweight packaging; we want to reduce our packaging. But what we really, really don't want to do is have packaging that fails.

Although it seems counterintuitive, the actual fact of the matter is that very often, single-serve sizes are the most environmentally friendly.