Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the greenest of them all...?

The loudest sound you hear in any debate about the merits of packaging is that of axes being ground. And the loudest grinding is the paper industry's rearguard defence of paper and cardboard against the encroachment of plastic. We all know the case for packaging. It accounts for one-tenth of all waste, and the replacement of goods damaged in transit costs 10 times as much precious and planet-damaging energy and raw materials as their packaging. The national press makes a great fuss about the wasteful primary packaging that, elsewhere, its advertising is encouraging readers to consume. So retailers are making great play of what Dick Searle, chief executive of the Packaging Federation, says are "miniscule primary-packaging reductions". Leaving their suppliers to sort it out. Warwickshire producer-responsibility organisation Valpak said last year that the 'Courtauld Commitment' retailers had signed up to a couple of years ago to cut primary packaging waste meant its producer members needed more transit packaging to distribute products to supermarkets. Searle says the huge recent growth in shelf-ready packaging "has been a godsend for the corrugated business, but it's meant more packaging. Why have the retailers done it? Because it's saved them a fortune in labour." One set of packaging goes all the way through the system right on to the shelf. Andrew Barnetson of the Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) says packaging should be optimised across the whole supply chain, and there's no doubt supply chain collaboration can yield big cost and eco-benefits. Retailer Boots develops and manufactures own-brand products at its Nottingham site. The company is chasing a zero waste-to-landfill target and a reduction in own-brand packaging by 2.5% per year until 2010. It worked with Envirowise to redesign the 150,000 free-standing display units (FSDUs) it uses each year to promote products in its shops. Boots supplied FSDUs fully assembled, four to a pallet. Made of cardboard, plastic and metal, they could not be separated for recycling or dismantled for disposal. After a design competition, Boots introduced a a 100% recyclable, cardboard, fully collapsible FSDU in June 2006. In the first 18 months the new design saved £193,000 in transport costs, £200,000 in disposal costs and diverted 500 tonnes from landfill. But the lessons go well beyond the retail trade. Tecquip's Duco division designs and makes sub-sea umbilical systems for the offshore oil and gas industry. Duco took electric cables and steel tubes for umbilical manufacture in steel drums which could not be returned and went to scrap metal dealers. Duco has worked with its supplier to redesign the drums so that they can be returned for use again. Since 2004, 259 drums have been reused, saving nearly £65,000 in disposal costs. Paul Albone, managing director of Bristol consultancy Environmental Lean Solutions, says the nub is to find out how much packaging is just enough. And the nub of that is to talk to suppliers about how they deliver the right materials, components or sub-assemblies in the manner that's most efficient for you: "You sit down with the supplier and say, 'We're getting this component in a bag, that's in a box, that's in a big box, and then when it comes into our factory we have to take it out of the big box, the little box and the bag before we can use it'. From a lean point of view," says Albone, "every one of those steps is completely wasteful." Albone says that if you arrange with your supplier that it's almost a one-touch operation to take the product out of its tote and use it on lineside, "not only have you saved the time and effort in your own facility, but you've also saved all the time and effort in your supplier's facility." It's looking at the whole process, says Albone, working out what's vital and stripping out the rest. Companies that source overseas miss a massive trick, Albone insists, which is the chance to work with their suppliers and drive down total product costs. And you have to talk to customers. Microelectronics company Atmel of East Kilbride, Scotland, which makes smart card security chips for passports and credit cards, assembles the final product for shipping to customers from parts and components sent from other plants. Waste secondary packaging – much of it new wafer boxes, anti-static plastic bags, bubble wrap, protective shipment foams and a cardboard outer box – was piling up in Atmel's skips. Atmel could reuse it for one customer in five. But use of the rest was constrained by quality restrictions and customer requirements. Atmel's environmental team approached a few key customers with the biggest impact on the packaging re-use programme to ask them to agree to packaging changes. They asked them if they could use good quality boxes without competitors' logos on them to protect the products during transit and storage. Re-using secondary packaging saved £2,500 a year from cardboard and £1,100 a year from bubble wrap. Skip collections for landfill were reduced from five to two collections a week, saving 2.4 tonnes of waste and cutting disposal costs by 60% or £5,000 a year. The same collaborative approach might allow goods to be stacked directly on a pallet, without packaging into boxes, then putting sheets between layers and shrink wrapping the whole. This is how Rexam at Milton Keynes now ships can bodies to Coca Cola and its other customers. The pallet debate is whether to use the Chep-type system or ordinary pallets. But whatever the choices, Searle says, most manufacturers reduce packaging for cost reasons. Envirowise estimates that UK businesses lose up to 4.5% of annual turnover every year through avoidable waste. Whatever the strength of the environmental arguments one way or another, says Searle "it will come down to hard commercial realities". Jean-Louis Evans, managing director of packaging company TUV, agrees: "Durability and strength are not the only concern – the major factor for manufacturers is cost." But he goes on to say that "rather than seeing environmentally-friendly packaging as a nuisance, manufacturers need to take full advantage and think further than simply recycling". Green question The big question is what 'green' packaging looks like. The debate hinges around corrugated versus returnable transit packaging (RTP). Jenni Rosser, who heads the Envirowise Eco-Design team, says a lot of companies are now asking whether they should replace cardboard crates or boxes with RTP or other forms of secondary and tertiary packaging, and how they should do it. Fitness for purpose is the overriding consideration, Searle insists: packaging used to display bags of potatoes would not be suitable for packets of biscuits. Using corrugated means that the retailer has to buy the corrugate and, once used, either buy a Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) to show that a waste reprocessor has turned the waste packaging back into a new product, or pay to dispose of the rest. Retailers don't want all this trouble so they will press for RTP. Companies shipping own-label goods in corrugate boxes could replace these with returnable tote boxes. Jane Bickerstaffe, director of the packaging industry's Council for Packaging and the Environment (Incpen), says the RTP argument is far from straightforward. Goods once held together in boxes have to be taken out and put on the trays. They usually don't fit exactly, which means not only that you're transporting more air but also that the goods could rattle about and be damaged. "People need to be aware of the options available and ask [whether it] could work for their particular system." Most companies think that returnable crates are the answer, says Rosser. RTP supplier Linpac Allibert claims a study found that the carbon footprint of its RTP is 67.8% less than cardboard. The average life of a plastic container is seven years, sometimes longer, and they can then be recycled. "But they have to do a bit more of an in-depth calculation than that," says Rosser. The calculation has to include how many crates they need to buy at the beginning to make sure they don't run out and the logistics of getting the crates back. Reusable crates are the right answer if you have a large number of regular customers from whom the crates can be returned, she says. But companies using generic carriers may not find it easy to get the crates back. Crates used in the food or chemicals industries have to be washed before reuse. Barnetson says this means moving the crates to a washing station and the energy, water use and other impacts associated with washing. "There is no hard and fast rule. You can't say that one is better than the other," says Barnetson. Paper is renewable; plastics are oil based. For very many decades now, Barnetson says, industry has been recycling four fifths of the cardboard it uses. People need to remember, says Barnetson, that used cardboard is not waste material. If you were to take corrugated out of the waste stream, all you'd be doing is removing raw material that could be used to make new boxes. Corrugated packaging offers good protection with relatively little material and it can be cut to fit more or less anything. Usually that means you can cram more goods into the same lorryload. And you can print on it. Barnetson says papers constantly grow stronger and lighter, die-cutters can make ever-more complex shapes, and predictive software helps produce the best result. Designers at one drinks distributor used computer modelling to simulate the stresses on pack and product. By tweaking pack design, the number of products per pack and the layout on the pallet, they cut 12% from packaging costs and reduced vehicle movements by 8%. Packaging requirements change all the time, says Bickerstaffe. "The thing to do is be aware of all the options available to you. Look at whether they work in your system and you'll then have all sorts of opportunities for making improvements." Obtaining the best price for recycled material has a large impact on the overall cost of waste management. If you use enough non-recyclable packaging – cardboard – you can generate revenue from it, says Albone. Even today. Corrugated prices didn't collapse, says Searle, except for very low quality material. Good quality corrugated has held its price and is now worth more than at any time before the credit crunch. "If you have good quality material," says Barnetson, "it will always command a reasonable price, certainly more than the cost to have it taken away by a company that's only going to charge you to treat it as rubbish." When you think about packaging, says Albone, you need to think about what each packaging step does and whether it's needed. "A lot of the time it's based on assumptions, or on what we've done in the past." You have to work out which packaging is critical and whether you can change it.