The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Little did we know there is an entire website devoted to sustainable packaging! Now that we've discovered it (and added it to our blogroll), we can recommend this amusing post--couched in the form of a report from the Housewares Show at Chicago's McCormick Place convention center--titled "Sustainable Packaging, the Housewares Show, and the Five Stages of Grief."

Blogger Dennis Salazar shows how consumer products companies confronted with the new demand for sustainable packaging are passing through psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's famous "Five Stages of Grief"--Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. You'll have fun reading his post and figuring out which stage you and the companies you work with are currently passing through.

Labels: Dennis Salazar, Packaging

In the aftermath of a conference on sustainable packaging, a group of us were presented with this question:

While Wal-Mart stil obviously lurks as a key driver of many sustainability goals, I'm wondering whether companies have progressed beyond Wal-Mart's directives. In other words, if Wal-Mart were to abandon its Scorecard tomorrow, would brand owners and packaging suppliers continue to move forward with their sustainability goals or would they jump off that bandwagon?

One of my fellow observers commented:

If Wal-Mart were to abandon its Scorecard tomorrow (which it won't), it would have little impact on the sustainability movement overall because manufacturers--large and small--are coming to realize that the principal driver of sustainability is economic.

I agree--with the following proviso. While there's a powerful economic logic behind less-wasteful, sustainable packaging, it is obviously the case that Wal-Mart's packaging edict has dramatically increased the interest in it and accelerated the progress being made on this front.

If Wal-Mart abandoned its initiative, or went in a different direction, it would have a huge impact on packaging simply due to its direct economic clout with its suppliers. When Wal-Mart sneezes, 60,000 suppliers catch cold.

Wal-Mart's packaging guidelines are like a private regulation, the issuance of which has something like the effect of law. It's one thing to acknowledge that pollution equals financial waste, but very few companies would move forward (at least to the degree they have) without the pressure exerted by regulation.

What's interesting to me about Wal-Mart's guidelines, and about the sustainable packaging movement in general, is that they require the active cooperation of the entire value chain, more so than most sustainability issues I have encountered. Wal-Mart is very far down the chain which, in addition to its size and clout, is why its action has the potential to be game-changing, not just for its direct suppliers, but for theirs and theirs and theirs.

Now if the Sustainable Packaging Coalition could figure out how to get Wal-Mart one step further down the chain--to consumers--that would truly change the game. The retailer has just announced that it reached its goal of selling 100 million low impact fluorescent bulbs, and ahead of schedule at that. Imagine if they could figure out how to get customers into the stores around recycling!

Labels: Packaging, Supply Chain, Wal-Mart

An interesting article from a New York Times series on business and "The Energy Challenge" about how some companies are rethinking their packaging practices to reduce waste, cut shipping costs, and improve recyclability. There is certainly plenty of room for consumer companies to do a better job of making their packaging eco-friendly. But one key issue that is sometimes overlooked is the competitive marketing aspects of packaging.

Suppose you are selling an item that will end up on the health care or cosmetics or housewares shelf in your local discount store. And suppose the product itself is quite small--for example, a tube of something that is two by five inches in size. It may seem like a no-brainer to re-design the tube using stronger, more rigid materials that enable you to get rid of the bulky cardboard box surrounding the tube. It's certainly a wise environmental move.

But what if none of the competing companies follows suit? The result could be that your product ends up looking a lot smaller, taking up less space on the store shelf, and therefore attracting less attention from customers. Unconsciously, customers may even think, "Package A looks bigger than Package B, yet they cost the same--so Package A must be a better bargain." And the fact that the fine print discloses that the tube in both cases contains the same 3 ounces of product may not register with busy, harried shoppers.

Thus, an individual company's well-intentioned move toward more sustainable packaging may end up hurting its own business--not a desirable outcome, to say the least.

(In a funny way, I've seen this phenomenon at work in the industry I happen to know best, book publishing. During my years as a publisher, I had a number of marketing and sales managers who told me, "Please don't publish any books that are just 150 pages long. They look skimpy and get lost on bookstore shelves, especially when they're displayed spine-out." The result is that publishers ask authors to expand manuscripts so as to get the books up to 250 pages or more and thereby make them more noticeable--and saleable. Which helps to explain why so many books read like "glorified magazine articles" that someone has padded with fluff: They are.)

These competitive pressures are why a crucial role is played by the Wal-Marts of the world, as discussed in the Times article. By creating and enforcing across-the-board packaging standards for their suppliers, the big retail chains can encourage companies to move toward more responsible packaging without fearing they will be losers in the shelf-space wars. It's a great example of how supply-chain interconnections are one key to reshaping the world of business along more sustainable lines.

Labels: Packaging, Supply Chain, Wal-Mart, Waste