Sonoco Helps Customers Shrink Environmental Footprint
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Sonoco, Hartsville, S.C., USA, reports that its packaging designers and engineers and material scientists are using the company's sustainable packaging design software to help 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.
"We are working to balance the growing demand from our customers, consumers, and retailers for ‘greener' packaging with requirements for convenience, performance, and price," said Jeff Schuetz, staff VP, Global Technology, Consumer Packaging. "Retailers and consumer product companies are increasingly integrating sustainability into their business strategies and looking for Sonoco to help make those efforts successful."
Sonoco's True Blue line of sustainable packaging solutions and recycling services provides customers with packages that offer a clear environmental advantage over the package they were designed to replace through the use of more sustainable materials or source reduction or because they require less energy, water and/or raw materials to produce or result in fewer carbon emissions.
Among its environmental footprint reducing efforts, Sonoco helped Kraft Foods convert 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% recycled materials and has received chain-of-custody certification from the Rainforest Alliance's SmartWood program. The move to Sonoco's composite can bodies also reduced both brands' environmental footprint through a material, energy inputs, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
Sonoco is also converting the world's leading infant formulas from metal cans to composite cans that average 50% recycled content by weight and provide the same performance as traditional metal cans.
One of Sonoco's new protective packaging designs for Hewlett-Packard (HP) LaserJet printers reduced the volume of foam required by more than half, cut the pack's corrugated weight by 69%, and decreased overall packaging volume by 52%. 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 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.
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