Category: Sustainability Tools

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Can public companies be sustainable?

In a recent Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread, I asked Patagonia COO Doug Freeman: “What is the biggest impediment from business transitioning from a linear take-make-use to a more sustainable model?” He pointed out what many of us already know — we have to focus on the triple bottom line. But what he also pointed out is that none of the 1% for the Planet companies are publicly owned.
The topic of transforming business models is also a trending topic at SUSTPACK 2015. So far this week, attendees heard this theme echoed in Minal Mistry’s Sustainable Materials Management workshop and the opening keynote session.
SUSTPACKheader2.132535
This got me thinking, can public companies be sustainable?
By definition, a public company is owned by many individuals who buy shares of stock in the company. These owners expect a payback on their investment either through cash dividends or a making a profit when they sell their shares. See Investopedia for a more thorough explanation.
This model relies on ongoing profitability to meet these expectations. The traditional way to achieve this is through growth — more products, more sales, more profit. Profitability — through growth — is the prevailing measure of success. The impact on the environment may vary when you consider sales of products versus services, but the paradigm remains.
Public companies are subject to more transparency than privately owned companies through public disclosures, which can be a good thing. In fact, the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is working to create sustainability accounting standards to integrate into current reporting requirements. However, public companies are highly profit driven and power is dispersed through shareholders, expressed through a board of directors.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that private companies are also highly profit driven. But is their business model more open to sustainable models of success? How do private owners incorporating sustainability priorities impact success? Are private companies more willing to take new or different risks?
In public companies, we do see impact investing taking root. This public pressure, especially with the growing purchasing power of millennials, may move fast in the coming years. B Corporations, like Patagonia, are also a trend to follow.
This isn’t a value judgement on public versus private companies, but it does make me wonder how we can change future business models. We have limited resources, and limited capacity to handle the byproducts of our existence. We should be beyond arguing this issue. But we have some serious hurdles before we can say we’ve made it.
My answer: neither models are there yet. But we can get there.

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How Talkers and Walkers Use Data

One phrase that especially stuck with me at SPC Advance came from Domtar’s vice president of sustainability, David Struhs, explaining that sustainability data is better suited as a windshield rather than a rear-view mirror. I think it is a helpful reminder that while measurement tools and scorecards are important, we have come a long way in making them better, what is more important today is how we use the data to set real goals and take meaningful action.
Mr. Struhs is featured in a recent MIT Sloan Management School report Sustainability’s Next Frontier: Walking the Talk on Sustainability Issues that Matter Most that emphasizes this point. The report provides clear data on how sustainability strategy provides measurable business value. But  maybe more importantly, the report also makes clear that while businesses agree with and understand the data behind sustainability’s business value, they are, for the most part, not taking action to mine this business value. The MIT Sloan report, which includes a survey of more than 5,300 executive and manager respondents from 118 countries, explains:
“There is little disagreement that sustainability is necessary to be competitive — 86% of respondents say it is or will be. Sustainability’s next frontier is tackling the significant sustainability issues — or, in the parlance that is gaining currency, “material sustainability issues” — that lie at the heart of competitive advantage and long-term viability. Yet many companies struggle to match their strong level of sustainability concern with equally strong actions. They still wrestle with settling on which actions to pursue and aligning around them.”
There is all kinds of data out there for better decision making. Scorecards for every question. The challenge is how do we use this information? There is little doubt that leadership companies from the banking and forest products industries to IT and healthcare are connecting sustainability with profits. One aspect that sets them apart, however, is that these leadership companies leverage data not just to see where they have been, but also, where they want to go–what MIT Sloan describes as moving from  a “talker” to a “walker.”
For more info you can read MIT Sloan’s report including “Portrait of a Walker: Domtar” at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/sustainabilitys-next-frontier/.  

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Part 4: Life Cycle Assessment – A Blending of Art and Science.

In the last of my four-part series, I’ll describe the new tertiary packaging model in COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment) which is being released on October 7, 2013.
There is no better way to understand something than to tear it down and rebuild it. At least that’s my motto…sometimes. When it came to building the tertiary packaging model for COMPASS® the research was interesting but it wasn’t until I began to fundamentally unravel several types of pallets that I realized all the thought that goes into designing them to meet the specified use scenarios. In the process, I collected and dismantled block type and stringer type pallets, the kind used to move groceries and construction materials in the U.S., and some specialized pallets used for shipping large office equipment. The goal was to understand the configuration, the nailing pattern, the number and type of fasteners used, the identity of wood types, and the overall weight of the pallet. In the process, I amassed a pile of lumber, some softwood species and some hardwood species, a lot of bent and rusted nails and calloused hands. This was the beginning of the parallel projects—on one hand life cycle data modeling and software development for COMPASS, and on the other hand, utilizing the lumber for creative up-cycling efforts (see A Wood Pallet’s Artful Journey).
The first effort (LCA – Life Cycle Assessment – data modeling and software development for COMPASS) led to collaboration with faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s industry leadership committee (ILC) on transport packaging, and other experts in tertiary packaging. The result was the inclusion of tertiary packaging components into the screening LCA workflow of COMPASS. The new additions expand the packaging system to include primary packages inside secondary shippers with supporting components, and a unit count of these assemblies on a pallet or other B2B delivery format with supporting components such as wraps, straps and cushioning. In effect, the packaging portrayed in the image below plus all the intermediary transportation needed to move packaged goods from manufacture to the retail shelf can now be captured in COMPASS.

Designing Sustainability Into Packaging
The packaging design process, as with other design exercises, starts with a need and moves to ideation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an ideal tool to allow exploration of different concepts to fulfill the identified need, and select the choice that best fits the sustainability priorities of the company and the brand. Through the process, one can quantify environmental impacts for impact categories such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, fossil fuel consumption, water consumption, human health, aquatic toxicity and others. Having this kind of information during the early design steps expands the ability of design professionals to include environmental impacts of a package design into the decision-making process along with the more traditional considerations like cost, performance, aesthetic and regulatory parameters. The result is a whole-system perspective that can produce packages that are optimized for a specific set of criteria to be more sustainable.

COMPASS is a streamlined LCA software specifically tailored for packaging design evaluation. It is an effective tool to help make informed design decisions that are aligned with the company’s greater sustainability goals. Leading brands, logistics companies, consultancies, and academic institutions all use COMPASS to build better packaging for today’s marketplace.
New changes in the packaging community related to environmental performance reporting are driving industry toward consistent B2B data sharing and enhanced transparency about the materials and processes used to develop both package and product. In the packaging community, these initiatives include the Global Protocol for Packaging Sustainability (GPPS) and the GS1 reporting standard. The GPPS contains a set of performance indicators for packaging that are now incorporated in the GS1 barcode system and will soon allow easy sharing of key environmental indicator data in the GPPS between trading partners. At stake are such lofty and core sustainability principles as embedding systems thinking into package and product design, benchmarking and performance tracking, and data transparency for B2B supply chain communication. On this path, companies will need a simple way to calculate the impacts associated with their packages for value chain disclosure, and COMPASS can help.
With this expanded model, one can compare primary packaging alternatives starting at the concept stage, include the secondary containment options, factor in tertiary packaging components such as pallets, slip sheets, edge cushion, wraps and straps, and account for all intermediate transportation legs needed to move the finished product to a retail chain. Detailed information such as this can enhance the ability of businesses to incorporate sustainability parameters effectively into operations and incrementally move the overall SOP towards a new norm—one that can lead to an enhanced materials management economy: a sustainable economy.
Such incremental operational improvements are essential to fulfill the vision of sustainable materials management (SMM) where materials are used in a carefully considered and wise manner, where toxicity and adverse effects are minimized or eliminated by design, and where material recovery is optimized so that the materials that are collected can fulfill their full life cycle potential by being available for new packaging and products. Life cycle assessment is the only comprehensive method that can help businesses glean environmental impacts associated with their processes, products, and services. Its widespread usage into everyday practice is essential to measuring and tracking progress to be able to make the necessary course corrections on the sustainability journey towards an industrial system with greater environmental stewardship.
Visit https://design-compass.org or contact me at [email protected] to learn more about LCA or COMPASS. Also, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @amistryman
 
 

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Part 3: A Wood Pallet's Artful Journey

In this part three of a four part series, I’d like to explore the creative side of the life cycle of some pallets. There is a growing urban hobbyists movement that uses the pallet to make basic yet creative products; check out 35 Creative Ways To Recycle Wooden Pallets for examples. Approaching the problem from a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) perspective, however, I became intrigued by the relatively low public profile tertiary packages (sometimes called transport packaging) play in comparison to the flashier on-the-shelf primary packages. Secondary and tertiary packages understandably play the supporting role to the charismatic primary packages that are designed to get our attention. Yet without the supporting cast, the lead role would scarcely be very effective.

As the product owner of GreenBlue’s COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment), an LCA tool tailored for packaging design evaluation and improvement, I was interested in developing a comprehensive model that applies LCA to quantify the environmental burdens associated with the entire packaging system needed to deliver a product to the store shelf, including all the intermediate steps. Along with the requisite research, software development, data modeling, and validation steps, I also embarked on a journey to learn about the materials that made up the ubiquitous wood pallet. I was interested in the potential of the materials—not mere reuse or recycle, but potentially up-cycling into truly long lived products. There is a lot of hardwood used in pallets made in the U.S. South East and I wanted to explore the potential of the material with its built-in limitations. I had just completed construction of my own Three Beagle Workshop, and this challenge was perfect for my interest in multimedia art made with materials from found objects. And, I found pallets almost everywhere!

The first task was to tear down a few pallets and see what made them work. It seemed simple enough a task, but it proved be more difficult than expected. You see, pallets, even the expendable types, are very well constructed and able to withstand a great deal of force. Muscle power wasn’t enough to produce usable pieces of lumber so I employed power tools and decided to cut the nails instead of pulling them out to separate the various parts. This worked well and I soon had a decent pile of wood parts of fairly uniform, though worn, looking lumber. The next, more creative part of the job was to envision the potential locked within the limited configuration of the boards and planks.  I was intent on producing a product that did not resemble a pallet as the example in the above link, and still retained the distinct characters of wood that had lived a completely different life. This meant working with the dents, the knots, and most of all lumber with nails in them!

The first couple of products still had remnants of the pallet. Here is one 48″x48″ 2-way entry stringer type pallet reconfigured into a potting table:

   

pallet potting table

 And a sturdy European block pallet (EPAL) that had some mass to it. It became the base for a small wood shed to complement the backyard fire pit. Both of these items were functional and long-lived, yet they reveal the pallet origins, so back to the drawing board. Both pallets were destined to be hauled away in the municipal solid waste (MSW) and disposed at the landfill or at best turned into mulch.
   
 
Any woodworker knows the havoc nails in wood can cause on hand and power tools alike. But, I was determined, and with a bit of planning and patience, success! Here is the result of patience and working with the limitation imposed by the materials at hand. In the end, the success was more rewarding because the final product proudly exhibited the scars borne of the past life of the lumber. And, from an aesthetic perspective, the piece below reveals the grace that comes from passage of time and weathering. See for yourself:



dining table made from pallets   pallet dining table
Of course, there was a pile of spare parts that couldn’t be thrown away. When the opportunity to design a display for a collection of native bird painting arose, they were just perfect. With a bit of imagination those bits and pieces from several pallets were reborn as a gallery display for Virginia bird paintings.
Creative Things to Do With Pallets Photo Display     creative reuse photo tree display made from pallets
This creative process of tearing down wooden pallets paralleled the LCA model development process for COMPASS, and invariably influenced the nuances therein. In the next and final article, we will examine the depth of the tertiary packaging model in COMPASS.
Until then, if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on Twitter at @amistryman or comment below.

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Part 2: Secondary and Tertiary Packaging in Municipal Solid Waste

Tertiary Packaging And Compass Continued…

Let’s start part two of our four-part series with some basic facts about packaging in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). In 2011, the overall recovery of packaging material was at approximately 51% with corrugated board and steel leading the charge in terms of highest material recovery. The overall rate is deceiving because the highly recovered materials such as steel and corrugated board skew the average as seen in the graphs below (2013, US EPA 2011 Facts and Figures Fact Sheet) and in this great infographic from the U.S. EPA.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In this post, I’d like to focus on the types of packaging that work in the background to bring the huge assortment of products we buy (fresh and packaged food, cosmetics, detergent, medicine, car parts, clothing, shoes, sporting goods, etc. ) to the shops we frequent. These packages have no fancy font, color, imagery or shape to catch your eye. In fact, many of them are plain brown corrugated boxes that make up the bulk of secondary packages and are recovered at a rate of about 91%. This recovered fiber is reused to make many types of paper products including new corrugated boxes. On the tertiary packaging front, wood plays a prominent role in the form of pallets and crates. Pallets are the workhorses of industrial packaging and come in a large variety of configurations to accommodate the various industrial specifications.
Companies such as CHEP manage many wood pallet configurations as a pooled resource with relatively long life span. These pallets are used and repaired many times to maximize the investment in material, cost, and design. Pallets also come in expendable variety that are typically used only once or a few times and then discarded. It is the expendable variety that we see in the back of grocery stores or the big box stores. These pallets sometimes find their way into the MSW and are included in the data above as “wood.”
Every year, 1.9 billion wooden pallets are in circulation in the United States, transporting a variety of goods.[1] Depending on the way the pallets are manufactured and managed, their life span and possibly their fate at end of useful life varies. Managed or pooled pallets are repaired multiple times to extend the life of the asset. They are sturdier to begin with to accommodate a relatively longer life. They may be broken down into parts to be reused to repair other pallets in the pool. On the other hand, expendable pallets may not be as sturdy as reusable types. The material investment is not managed as an asset and hence has a higher probability of disposal via landfill or incineration.
So, where do all the pallets go? 

  • Recycle – Wood from pallets is often mulched and used as landscape material. Some pallets are creatively recycled into useful household craft. See next article for examples from the Three Beagle Workshop.
  • Reuse – pallets are collected, repaired, and sold in a secondary market.
  • Incinerate – some fraction of wood pallets end up at waste to energy (WtE) facilities where the materials are incinerated and the resultant energy is used for heat or electricity generation
  • Dispose – to landfill

In the next installment, we will look at pallets in a more creative light and see what happens to some of pallets in circulation.

[1] 2013, IFCO. http://palletsbyifco.com/recycling/, accessed 19 August 2013.

 
 

 

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Part 1: Packaging System and Sustainability

Tertiary Packaging and COMPASS®

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition began in 2005 with the Definition of Sustainable Packaging that emphasizes the responsible use of materials for packaging using a life-cycle approach.  A great deal of the effort has been focused on improving the primary packages—the ones we take home that physically contain the product companies are selling. Innovations in packaging design and materials have continued at a steady pace to adapt to changing market trends, consumer preferences, regulations, and waste reduction efforts. These changes are quite visible on the shelves of our favorite shops. With that said, there are other kinds of packaging that provide crucial services behind the scenes that shoppers may not think about but are vital in delivering products to our favorite shops’ shelves.
This packaging is sometimes referred to as secondary and tertiary packaging and is used for business-to-business (B2B) transactions. A common example of secondary package is the ubiquitous brown corrugated box. A wood pallet, the kind we see behind the grocery store or at big box stores, exemplifies a tertiary package. Both secondary and tertiary packaging may be used to collate goods for delivery. Each type of package is developed to serve a specific service with the goal of delivering the product safely and intact from the manufacturer to the end user. The image below illustrates the different packages and their general role beginning with the wine bottle as the primary package, providing direct protection and marketing appeal for the product, the box with its foam cushion as the secondary package, protecting the larger grouping of the product, and the pallet as the tertiary package, providing the support necessary for safe transport of the product to its destination.

Of course, this is a simplified illustration and there are many other variables that need to be accounted for in order to deliver the product to the shop shelf. Factors that influence the types and combination of packaging employed may include things like product weight and fragility, spoilage consideration, stacking strength, temperature and weather, transport method, etc. These complexities go into the ultimate design of the system, and sustainability outcomes need to be included in the design flow to assess the impact of delivering the product. In order to improve the system one must be able to quantify the implications of everything that goes into making the items that make up the whole delivery system. In the illustration above, this includes all the materials (glass, metal, paperboard, plastics, wood etc.), the processes needed to make the packaging from the materials, any supplemental components needed such as plastic wrap or straps, and the overall implications to transportation.
The discipline of life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a convenient tool that is increasingly used by designers and companies to develop a model that quantifies the overall environmental burdens associated with product and service delivery. Quantification of environmental impacts can help improve the choices made during the design process to positively impact the corporate sustainability strategy. GreenBlue’s COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment) is an LCA tool tailored for packaging design evaluation and improvement. Historically, it’s been used for optimizing the primary packaging. But, this October, COMPASS will start to include a new model to quantify the entire system, to include both single use and reusable tertiary packaging.
In the next installment, we will examine packaging in the solid waste stream, in particular secondary and tertiary packaging and what happens to those materials.

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A Merging of Standards and Sustainability

In “At the Intersection of Standards and Sustainability,” published in the March/April 2013 issue of Standardization News, editor in chief Maryann Gorman wrote, “… modern development — manufacturing, infrastructure projects, building construction and so on — takes place in a vast and interconnected world of systems. Global supply chains, regional regulatory schemes and the emergence of integrated systems like intelligent highways and buildings mean that most materials are produced within overlapping economic, social, regulatory, environmental and material requirements. And it is at this intersection that standards and sustainability meet.”
For the packaging community, standardization for measurement of sustainability performance started its journey in 2009 with the release of GreenBlue’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition®-produced “Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework©.” The Framework synthesized the vast body of measurement literature into a core set of indicators relevant to the packaging supply chain. Then in 2011, the Consumer Goods Forum picked up this work and condensed the effort into the Global Protocol for Packaging Sustainability (GPPS 2.0), which provides a common language for packaging sustainability related measurements. Presently, the set of environmental attributes and life cycle indicators within GPPS are poised to be released into a global GS1 standard that will provide a platform for submitting and the sharing environmental measurements between producers and retailers in a consistent and unified manner.
The GS1 GDS-GPP Packaging Sustainability Standard is in review and comments phase and is scheduled for release this summer. With the rollout of this additional layer into GS1 standard platform, a producer can release sustainability-related data via the GS1 global trade item number (GTIN) barcode system, thus allowing buyers to gain access to those data without the producer having to fulfill multiple requests from buyers from different retailers for the same information. Such central data sharing will allow ease of communication along the supply chain and with luck, facilitate overall transparency, benchmarking, and tracking progress for product categories.
One clarification: the GS1 standard only standardizes the reporting and sharing of sustainability indicators related to a package based on its assigned barcode. It does not standardize the methods by which the measurements are calculated. That is a different conversation. Stay tuned for the standard’s release date this summer.

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Tackling Social Implications of Global Activities

On September 25, 2012, President Obama’s address to the Clinton Global Initiative touched on a significant labor issue that has resulted from the interconnected global economy: “All the business leaders who are here and our global economy companies have a responsibility to make sure that their supply chains, stretching into the far corners of the globe, are free of forced labor. The good news is more and more responsible companies are holding themselves to higher standards. And today, I want to salute the new commitments that are being made. That includes the new Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking — companies that are sending a message: Human trafficking is not a business model, it is a crime, and we are going to stop it.”
Quantification of social implication in the assessment of sustainable performance of industrial activities is one of the frontier areas in the life cycle assessment (LCA) community. The importance of the social aspects of sustainability are often underrepresented in sustainability discussions at various industrial levels. Most events that focus on industrial sustainability in once sector or another define their sustainability efforts in terms of economic prosperity, and more specifically, the economic terms of the individual company being represented. This narrow interpretation of sustainability restricts broader dialogues, which need to capture environmental and social implication—routinely generalized as externalities. It also draws attention away from fundamental wrong doing that permeate as an undercurrent, and ultimately helps to undermine the good work represented in improved industrial ecology and industrial sustainability.
President Obama added: “It is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name – modern slavery.”
The President issued an executive order to strengthen what he said is already a strict policy ensuring that government contractors do not engage in forced labor. “In short, we’re making clear that American tax dollars should never, ever, be used to support the trafficking of human beings. We will have zero tolerance; we mean what we say, we will enforce it,” said Obama.
This is a bold statement and a necessary step to help us inch towards a better global tomorrow. There is room for improvement for all actors regardless of industry, product category, market share, location, or economic status.
A few related websites to keep on your radar: www.SlaveryFootprint.org | www.socialhotspot.org