Design service helps CPGs shrink their environmental footprint

Lisa McTigue Pierce, Executive Editor

January 30, 2014

3 Min Read
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Using proprietary sustainable packaging design software, designers and engineers at Sonoco are helping customers reduce their packaging environmental footprint by substituting or eliminating materials, down-gauging structures and simplifying the package to improve its recyclability.

 

Sonoco is also working with customers to reduce and ultimately eliminate landfill waste at their manufacturing facilities.

 

Using their True Blue line of sustainable packaging solutions and recycling services, Sonoco has helped the following customers: 


Kraft Foods converted its Maxwell House, Nabob and Yuban brands of coffee from metal cans to more environmentally friendly rigid paperboard containers without sacrificing abuse resistance or shelf life. Less costly and more environmentally responsible than metal, the new cans are made from paperboard that contains more than 50 percent recycled materials and has received chain-of-custody certification from the Rainforest Alliance's SmartWood program. The move to Sonoco's high-performance composite can bodies also reduced both brands' environmental footprint through a material, energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

 

Unilever USA strengthened its Suave brand image, cut packaging costs and reduced its environmental footprint by working with Sonoco Global Plastics to redesign Suave's rigid plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles. The attractive new curve in the bottles' walls improved the overall strength of the bottles and reduced the resin required to produce the bottles by 16 percent.

 

PJ's Coffee of New Orleans is using vibrant, three-ply, foil-based flexible coffee bags that require 10 percent less material and 15 percent less energy to produce and result in 10 percent fewer carbon emissions than traditional four-ply flexible coffee bags.

 

The world's leading infant formulas is switching from metal cans to composite cans. Sonoco composite cans average 50 percent recycled content by weight and provide the same performance as traditional metal cans in abuse resistance and shelf life, but have a reduced environmental input-a reduction in material weight inputs, energy inputs, greenhouse gas emissions and certain regulated air emissions.

 

True Blue eco-friendly point-of-purchase displays like the one Sonoco's Global Services division designed and produced for Unilever's Vaseline Sheer Infusion body lotion are helping customers and their retail partners meet their sustainability and sales goals. By redesigning an existing floorstand wing unit, Sonoco cut the paperboard required to produce the display in half-from 65.2 to 32.65 square feet-without sacrificing its ability to attract customer attention.

 

Hewlett-Packard (HP) LaserJet printers reduced the volume of foam for their protective packaging designs by more than half, cut the pack's corrugated weight by 69 percent and decreased overall packaging volume by 52 percent. Most of the pack's components are made from recycled paperboard, so it's easier to recycle than the previous protective packaging. And, although it's lighter, less expensive and more sustainable than the previous package, it provides the same level of product protection.


Sonoco is also helping customers reduce and ultimately eliminate landfill waste through its Sonoco Sustainability Solutions (S3) waste-reduction consulting service. By identifying recycling alternatives for materials being sent to landfills and developing a more comprehensive recycling program at Unilever's Lipton Tea plant in Suffolk, Va., Sonoco helped the largest tea processing plant in the U.S. become a zero landfill facility in 2009.

 

Source: Sonoco

 

 

About the Author

Lisa McTigue Pierce

Executive Editor, Packaging Digest

Lisa McTigue Pierce is Executive Editor of Packaging Digest. She’s been a packaging media journalist since 1982 and tracks emerging trends, new technologies, and best practices across a spectrum of markets for the publication’s global community. Reach her at [email protected] or 630-272-1774.

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