Last year I was touring a production facility with seven shrink wrappers. It was a lovely warm March day -about 55 degrees outside. The doors to the facility were open in order to let the cool air in.  As we discussed the product line, speeds and quality, I became increasingly overheated.  The shrink wrappers were making me so hot. Even with the open doors and a slight breeze, it could not dissipate the heat generated by the shrink ovens. I kept trying to imagine the working conditions on a 95 degree day in July in that facility.

Armed with the obvious excessive heat generated by their current wrapping method, I asked if they were looking at energy costs in their calculation of potential savings. They replied that they were not.

Imagine our surprise to get a call from a prospect a few month ago who actually cared about the energy savings. They had done their own calculations of their current energy costs for their shrink wrapper and had concluded that the energy savings alone could justify the cost of switching to overwrapping. Unlike all our other customers who switched from shrink wrap, they were not calculating films costs.

More and more customers are looking at costs holistically. Take a look at this recent article on food companies saving money. Email sales@packagemachinery.com or give us a call at +1.413.732.4000 x110 to discuss ways we can save you money.

Someday soon some one will call us and look at both relative film and energy costs.

cucumbers becoming pickles

I recently visited a commercial kitchen which is part of a Community Development Corporation – a non-profit designed to encourage development in the community or region it serves. In this case the commercial kitchen is designed to help fledgling food businesses get off the ground by providing them business support in developing their food product to scale production, creating a business plan that works and getting necessary certifications. Once approved a fledgling food entrepreneur can rent production space including equipment by the hour, and use dry, refrigerated or freezer storage by the week. This space is also available to local non-profits such as Meals on Wheels, a meal delivery service for the elderly.

If you are thinking about getting started and don’t have a commercial kitchen near you, you could consider using a restaurant kitchen in its off hours.

Here are things to consider courtesy of the Franklin County CDC:

• Business Plan: get your ideas and goals in one document. Define your products, market and competitors. How much money will you need?
• Product Development: small batch testing. then lab analysis leads to scale up and testing and onto packaging and labeling
• Regulations: State licensing is required to sell wholesale and local licensing for retail. Meat and poultry require USDA approval. The FDA cares about products requiring acidification. The Bioterrorism Act requires FDA registration for all domestic food producers. Plus you need liability insurance.

We talked a lot about what kind of packaging works for different products and where the highest returns are in selling food products and how packaging supports that value perception. We also discussed what packaging can the kitchen justify buying as opposed to the brand owner.

As a food entrepreneur, you may be able to use a commercial or restaurant kitchen to create your product, but you may need to purchase your own packaging machinery, if you want to be able differentiate your product.

For more information about becoming a food entrepreneur, visit The Foodpreneur. For information about entry level overwrapping machinery for boxes or bundles look here, and for wrapping individual food items look here.

In light of the trade off between packaging and product waste, a few weeks ago I posted a question about what constitutes a sustainable wrapping material on a LinkedIn group, The Packaging Technology Forum. My question elaborated on sourcing of material and questioned both carbon creation and water use in creating material.

Responses ranged from condescending to thoughtful, but most seemed to feel that no material on the market today is truly sustainable, even if it is bio-sourced. Several worthwhile answers included

• Environmental value also must deal with what it replaces, and balance the various factors: energy, effect on air and water, disposal, carbon gain/loss (a future issues) etc. Allan Griff
• What looks good to customers isn’t necessarily the best, or even the right thing to do. You need to look carefully at where materials come from, what their effect is on product (protection and shelf life), and what really happens to them at the end of use, not just what you would like to happen. Iain Ferguson
• Use a material that can be recycled and then look for another material which is better. Use something that has a claim to be sustainable rather than discuss the issue and take no step towards sustainability. Actions make material sustainable, not talk. Ian W Cooper
• Printed films and material using inks and adhesives that are made by chemical substances, not easily to replace with bio-solutions…. Be serious and realistic…. There are hybrid solutions but the market doesn’t like to pay its costs. Giulio Ghisolfi
• The real problem in North America is consumer education and commitment. Michael Finnegan

The conclusion is that there is no miracle wrapping material yet, but there are intermediate ones if one is willing to pay for it. Consumer education remains an open issue, since without consumer engagement, contamination of the waste stream is a potential problem.

in the meantime, see my discussion of what Package can do to help with reducing your wrapping resource consumption.

“It argues global challenges such as climate change, scarcity of key resources, and rapid population growth ‘make it essential for us to reorient our global economy around sustainable, low-carbon patterns of consumption’.”

The long term cost of unsustainable practices outweighs the cost of consumer ignorance and points out the need to reposition products in anticipation of changing consumer values.

” ‘Smart brands and businesses will make money today by accelerating the transition to a sustainable future,’ said Dr Sally Uren, deputy chief executive of Forum for the Future, which produced the report in conjunction with Sainsbury’s and Unilever.”

At Package Machinery, we get many requests for advice on appropriate films to use with our overwrapping machines. The problem today is that many films are not yet at the point where we can wholeheartedly recommend any one film as the one that is carbon neutral, resource sustainable, clean water respectful and comparably priced to other films currently on the market.

At the risk of suggesting that our customers might want to spend more, picking a more sustainable film offers the chance to to be ahead of the market with some assurance that the consumer will be there with you in short order.

In the interim, here is one way of looking at the cost of various wrapping methods and what options to consider.

Says Sainsbury’s  chief  executive Justin King, ” ‘Being a sustainable company is not about box ticking, it’s about future-proofing your business and building trust and brand loyalty that will last for years to come.’ “

Many customers ask us about what sustainable wrapping materials should they consider. It is tough to answer but here are some things to think about.

Most of the conversation when it comes to flexible packaging is about using renewable sources. The reality is use of renewable sources often ignores the alternate uses of the raw material as well as the ingredients required to make the raw material into a wrapping material. Let me elaborate on unintended consequences.

For instance, corn can be made into ethanol (using more energy than it will generate in the form of petroleum for fertilizer and energy) and PLA which can be made into film for wrapping. Using corn this way has demonstrably driven up the price of corn and therefore its by product: meat. So should we make PLA from something other than corn, such as sugar? What about the destruction of rain forests to create sugar cane plantations as the alternative?

Now, from Greenblue.org, we learn that paper has all sorts of other ingredients. One of the key ones is water plus a whole host of unpronounceable ingredients. IS this sustainable? Greenblue doesn’t answer, but we should.

I am not trying to suggest that you should choose one wrapping material over another. What  I am saying is that to be truly sustainable requires looking at total cost assessment, which includes those costs you may not be paying for right now. Those include deforestation, clean water use, dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi, as well as the ones we know well: air quality, ozone levels, global warming by human action (as opposed to natural cycles the earth has gone through over millions of years).

The support Package Machinery can offer is that we try all of the materials we can on our overwrapping machines and stand ready to try new ones as they come out and our customers request it. As our customer, we will support you and help you make the best choice for your application. Perhaps the most important thing to know is that you can change wrapping material later and still use the same machine you bought from us.

Check out our video on making products more sustainable and our commitment to improve sustainability.

AT&T is unapologetic about its opportunism with greening the planet, stating up front that:

“The most competitive economies of the future will be those that turn natural resource constraints into opportunities.” — att.com/telepresencerevolution

Clearly we too would like to be opportunistic about our technology. Overwrapping uses less film and less energy (both items being natural resource based) than alternative wrapping methods. In particular, our machines, being servo driven, use fewer parts and require less maintenance than other overwrappers on the market. This reduces consumption of human resources too.

We offer higher machine speeds than most of our competitors as well.

I wish I could say that we were employing a disruptive alternative but overwrapping has been around for longer than flow wrap, if not quite as long as AT&T’s telephones. We simply were quicker to adopt servo technology to overwrapping than anyone else. But then Package Machinery has been building overwrappers since the mid-1930′s.

So, like AT&T, we would like to make a virtue of our reality and hope that our customers appreciate that their needs and our purposes are aligned.

Some interesting facts emerge from the Shelton Group survey.

• 69% of Americans report they are looking for greener products, up from 60% two years ago. Only 19% report that the economy has made them cut back on buying greener.
• 25% of consumers are driven by price while 50% choose based on brand name.
• Gender differences are based on category choice, not in their overall green purchasing.
• Over 60% of consumers report that they regularly recycle. Most Americans think that recycling is the most important of the three Rs (recycle, reuse and reduce). 28% says reducing consumption and 17% reusing is the most important way to reduce their environmental footprint.

Two things in this report really stood out for me.

1. The most important things on the food product label is “grown in the USA” which tied for first with “100% natural.” Shelton also saw considerable interest in “made in the USA” and “not made in China.”
2. Almost one third of Americans now consider a company’s environmental record to be the best guide, behind analyzing the ingredients or other details on the package such as green claims.

At Package Machinery, we take pride in our efforts to help our wrapping machinery customers reduce their film use through overwrapping, since we know that film is seldom, if ever, recycled. We are proud of our machines’ ability to run various green films along with paper and BOPP, since we know that this gives our customer options down the road that may not be economical today. Lastly, we pride ourselves on our machines’ ability to wrap with the lowest gauge film possible, lower than other overwrappers on the market. Check out our machines.

recycling instructions on product package

I can’t close without a pitch for helping the consumer out by telling them about the packaging and what to do with it.

Marks & Spencer Plan A 2011

In the UK, Marks and Spencer’s Plan A has been a leader in encouraging waste reduction since its inception in 2007. This makes their 2011 How We Do Business report of great interest. As the excerpt above shows, they detail their partnerships with charities to promote reuse of used clothing, what they are doing to recycle food waste from their stores. They state their original goals and their progress against those goals. To quote the report, “We’ve proved once again that sustainability makes good business sense, by generating a net benefit of over £70m through Plan A, and we expect this figure to increase as we scale-up our activities.”

Both these companies provide lessons in partnering but Marks & Spencer takes it one step further in engaging the consumer in the waste reduction process.

packaging disposal instructions from Marks & Spencer

It was from Marks & Spencer that we first learned of what retailers can do to educate consumers on packaging disposal. This instructional image on the left is smaller than the adjacent bar code, which mean that minimal but critical space is devoted to consumer education. It is large enough to tell the consumer what to do with all parts of the primary packaging.

Both these companies show us what is possible in partnerships.

While we were one of the few machinery companies there, there is a lot going on in plastics and in substitutions that enable easier recycling. MA Industries had recyclable paper strapping that is strong enough to replace plastic strap. Malnove had a pour spout for chipboard boxes that replaces metal with a recyclable cardboard rugged enough for the job. There were companies demonstrating plastics that are plant based and ones that compostable. Some were actually both. Coca Cola talked about their new plant bottle which fits in the PET recycling stream while using some plant-based plastic.

We had interesting conversations about wrapping alternatives and showed how much material one form of wrap uses vs. another. We embrace those discussions, even if we do not always reach agreement.

One area that continues to confuse us is the compostable plastic market. The terms Compostable is used freely but not always clearly. We encourage our customers to understand what it means. Compostable in an industrial composting facility means this plastic needs a high temperature in order to break down. It means  that the consumer and its local waste station needs to find the one of the 26 industrial composting facilities in the United States to deposit their compostable plastic. It also requires the consumer and its transfer station knowing and caring that they have that plastic in the first place.

Compostable can also mean home compostable. Yes, there are home compostable plastics. Those can go into your home composter because they degrade at the lower temperatures home composting uses.

package recycling instructions

It still remains to engage the consumer, so they can do their part. This sample above shows how one product contains information for the consumer to use so that the packaging can be reused or composted. This is the first step in consumer engagement for a post consumer re-use world.

We hope that all come away with ideas to engage their own operations and the consumer in minimizing packaging and its impact on solid waste.

Dead zone Gulf of Mexico 2006

The problem is that carbon is only one issue in being green. The list moves from carbon footprint to methane creation to water usage and it starts to get complicated. Most current plastic film comes from petroleum, ie carbon. Some comes from renewable sources, PLA (corn) and sugar cane, or cellulose (wood). For these the carbon may be less, but is not necessarily, because most fertilizer to grow crops comes from petroleum. Studies suggest that for one calorie of corn-based ethanol, it takes 1.2 calories of petroleum to create. The nitrogen and phosphorus loading that flows through our major rivers to the Gulf of Mexico has created a dead zone in the Gulf  of Mexico that is visible from space. Similar but different issues exist when one looks at cellulose (wood based materials) for water and energy use to process the wood into cellulose. In a recent Business Week article, International Paper documents its efforts to reduce both water and energy use. IP managed to reduce energy consumption by 21% in its processing.  Its virtue is rewarded by  annual savings of $221 million in 2010 terms.

All of this is great progress, but changing processes needs to be accompanied by an understanding of the new impacts that are created. Process change also needs to be flexible, because more change will occur as research offers new packaging possibilities. Meanwhile the goal needs to be to keep things out of the landfill.