Final Thoughts from the Sustainable Packaging Forum

With a five-hour wait at the Denver Airport before journeying home, I had the chance to review my notes and give some thought to a very informative two days.

The final day’s speakers and roundtables, in my opinion, got down to the nitty-gritty of evaluating a company’s sustainable practices and products: Measurement. Which tools should you use? In which contexts? All metrics are not created equal – so which do you choose?

John Heckman , Ph.D., is director of Five Winds International and an expert on Life Cycle Assessment. He essentially argued that LCAs are perhaps more important for setting internal goals than for public distribution given that companies have local/regional/and global impacts.

For instance, a while a certain manufacturer’s greenhouse-gas reductions – with a nod to Warner Bros. cartoons let’s call them ACME Inc. — are very important on a global level BUT in the community in which it operates not so much – where other issues are more important to local citizens and government leaders (e.g. water usage, employee safety). He noted that publicly communicating very complicated data is a challenge. Indeed.

And speaking of complicated – this brings me to the presentation of Dr. Gerald Rebitzer, director of product stewardship at Alcan Packaging Food Europe. Now, this guy has published more than 100 papers and book chapters on sustainability and lifecycle management…so no neophyte he.

Entitled “The (Dis) Connect Among Bio-baed/Renewable Materials, Other ‘Easy’ Strategies, and Sustainable Packaging Innovation,” Rebitzer maintains that Functionality is Key and therefore sustainability needs to measured and assessed based on performance criteria.

In an intense 20 minutes he treated the packed audience to a discussion based on looking at packaging in context – that it’s about sustainable consumption and production requiring multi-criteria lifecycle sustainability assessment and that communication needs to “Fact-Based.”

I couldn’t agree more. Which brings me to my closing point from the conference: Sustainability is a complex and on-going undertaking up and down the supply chain. Companies need to communicate what they are doing that is more sustainable and, more importantly, what they can offer other companies to make them more sustainable. What can you do for me?

From where I sit, the sooner companies begin to strategically – and in a verifiable and fact-based way – communicate to their customers the better for them. A year or so ago companies that communicated their sustainability advances and goals were placing themselves at a competitive advantage. Today, those that don’t are putting themselves in harm’s way and ceding the sustainable storyline to their competitors.

To those of you who’ve been kind enough to comment and call me with your own insights and questions – many thanks for reading and listening.

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