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The Rise of Sustainable Packaging – The Reuse Revolution

The Rise of Sustainable Packaging – The Reuse Revolution

eco-friendly, Sustainable Packaging0

Enterprises across a large number of nations, including those in the EU, China, and India, are increasingly adopting concepts of: “reduce”, “reuse”, and “recycle” in packaging. The reason behind this shift towards sustainable packaging is not hard to fathom. Statistics show disturbing trends around the usage of plastic and its negative impact on the ecological balance of the world. The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that every year nearly 1.5 million tons of waste comes from paper packaging alone, not to mention more than 13 million tons of plastic packaging. This calls for a broader proliferation of sustainable packaging. 

What is Sustainable Packaging?

Sustainable packaging seeks to reduce its carbon footprint over a period of time. Such reduction can happen in one of the following ways:

  • Use of eco-friendly raw materials that are 100% recycled or reusable 
  •  Reduce the production and supply chain process
  • Encourage a circular economy which extends the shelf life as well as usability of the packaging 

Challenges to Sustainable Packaging

Be it a self-motivated initiative or in response to government and regulatory agencies, the fact remains that the packaging industry is increasingly looking for means to make its offerings more sustainable. This requires enterprises across industry verticals to counter the following challenges 

  • Lack of Consensus: There is presently a lack of industry consensus on what should come under the purview of sustainable packaging.  The definition needs to ensure that the waste to landfill rate has come down due to the practical implementation of the ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’ philosophy
  • Rising Regulatory Pressure: Government authorities across countries are all set to increasingly focus on sustainable packaging, thus nudging corporations to meet evolving regulatory standards and guidelines around environmental conservation. For instance, China’s packaging masterplan will severely limit the use of specific processes or materials in the packaging supply chain. Such laws will also put pressure on the industry to adapt or perish.
  • Labeling and Coding Challenges: While many organic materials are considered as viable alternatives to plastic but these do not offer the operational convenience that plastic does. For instance, plant-based materials such as starch may be difficult to code and label to the same standards as plastic. This can influence the way coding and labeling and in the process compromise on the way in which operations are carried out for adding graphic content like batch numbers, expiry dates, and barcodes. 
  • Obstacles to Waste Recovery: One way to make sustainable packaging economically feasible is to ensure closed-loop recycling of packaging materials. However, an absence of well defined standard operating procedures, lack of economic incentives for people engaged in the logistics of waste collection and ambiguities in regulatory guidelines create a disconnect in the loop and thus pose significant challenges in waste recovery and recycling to business enterprises. 

What About the Real Incidence of Added Costs of Sustainable Packaging?

The challenges around sustainable packaging aren’t insurmountable. Enterprises need a nudge and collective focus to ensure a successful rollout. What should motivate enterprises to adopt sustainable packaging is that there is support from consumers. An Accenture survey says that more than 50% of consumers would pay more for sustainable products designed to be reused or recycled. This provides more impetus for brands to pursue sustainable packaging. 

How Can Enterprises Transition to Sustainable Packaging?

Here are some other reasons that should motivate brands to make sustainable packaging a part of their corporate DNA – 

1. Be Proactive for Compliance in Packaging

Many countries are preparing to shift to the use of reusable packaging materials that don’t contribute to landfills. For instance, in January 2018, the European Commission rolled out a comprehensive plan to ensure 100% reusable and recyclable plastic packaging by 2030. For enterprises to comply with evolving regulatory announcements on packaging in short notice they need to be agile and proactive

2. Focus on 2nd and 3rd Use Cases in Packaging

Many industry associations across the globe are coercing enterprises to adopt the concepts of “reduce”, “reuse”, and “recycle” to their packaging and thus to contribute to the planet with minimal or negligible impact on their bottom-lines. Industry associations like The Ellen MacArthur Foundation have got 11 biggest companies to commit to using packaging in a circular manner, thus encouraging 2nd and 3rd use. This shall require them to switch to 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 and thereby cut down on six million tons of waste per year.

3.Explore Ways to Reduce the Carbon Footprint 

Downgauging the weight of the packaging material with respect to the weight of the product can reduce the number of shipments and thus help contain carbon dioxide emissions. An example of this is reusable packs like KFC side containers that substantiate how packaging can be redefined to reduce the carbon footprint.

Some Enterprises That Are Leading by Example in Sustainable Packaging

Many enterprises across the FMCG domain are making impactful commitments to ensure outcomes at two levels – 

  1. Improving the sustainability of their packaging
  2. Redefining packaging systems and processes

Here are some interesting use cases that corroborate the statement

  1. Edible Coffee Cups – Air New Zealand serves over 8 million coffee cups a year. It launched a pilot in December 2019 to start edible coffee cups that are compostable and aim to cut down on dumping on landfills.  
  2. Reusable and Recyclable Bottles – Unilever has pledged to reduce virgin plastic use by 50% and use at least 25% recycled plastic for packaging, by 2025.
  3. Zero Single-Use Pilot – Blue Bottle Coffee has rolled out a zero single-use plastic pilot with an aim to transform all their US cafes to zero waste (i.e. 90% of the waste is diverted from landfill) by the end of 2020.
  4. World Without Waste – Coca Cola is working to create packaging that shall contain at least 50% recycled material by the end of 2030 under the auspices of its new project titled “World Without Waste”. 

Concluding Comments and the Way Forward to Sustainable Packaging

Sustainable packaging is fast becoming the de-facto approach for enterprises that want to keep their carbon footprints low and make existing supply chain processes efficient.  The challenges notwithstanding, there are success stories of enterprises that have implemented sustainable packaging to create a favorable effect on the environment and overhauled user experience for their customers. With support from the end consumer, enterprises can only look to make further headway.  Data analysis at Moglix suggests that 60% of enterprises in the industry verticals of FMCG, automobile and oil & gas are interested in switching over to sustainable packaging. This should provide more impetus for enterprises to strike a balance among the metrics for the profits, planet and people trifecta.

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Reducing Coronavirus Led Supply Chain Disruptions Now and Building Resilience for the Future

Reducing Coronavirus Led Supply Chain Disruptions Now and Building Resilience for the Future

COVID-19, Procurement strategies for Automobile Industry, Supply chain risk0

Credit ratings agency Fitch that had earlier pegged India’s real GDP growth rate for FY 2020-21 at 5.6% has now projected that the disruption caused by the contagion of the Novel Coronavirus throughout an integrated global economy could slow India’s real GDP growth rate by 0.5-1%. This projection notwithstanding, visibility into the impact on the global economy has been hard to come by. Josef Oehmen, associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Engineering Systems Design Group asserts that the Covid19 pandemic has no precedence that businesses can point to, no personal experience that corporate leaders can count on, no historical data for consultants to call on and therefore: there is no risk-adjusted value for businesses to act upon. 

In fact, not since the end of the Second World War have countries and corporations experienced a supply chain disruption of such global scale and magnitude coupled with loss of lives of such tragic proportions.Prof. Patrick Hanohan from Trinity College Dublin asserts that even if the death rate is as low as in the case of flu deaths due to effective containment, there shall be repercussions: supply chain challenges in the short term and weakening of demand and spending cuts in the intermediate-term.

Wading Through Troubled Waters Now: Mitigating the Supply Chain Disruptions Due to Covid19

Given the spread of the pandemic across the globe, several industry verticals in the manufacturing sector are faced with immediate supply chain challenges. 

First, is the dependence of some of the world’s largest companies or their suppliers that either has supply chain and procurement exposure to quarantined areas across three major economies: China, Italy, and South Korea. A study published in the Harvard Business Review asserts that 1000 such companies or their suppliers own more than 12000 facilities in such quarantined areas. Industry verticals with the highest supply chain and procurement exposure to quarantined areas in China, Italy, and South Korea include automotive, industrial engineering and heavy machinery (2,730), high tech and consumer electronics (3,238), healthcare (1,562) and consumer goods(1,139).

Second, in the context of the lockdowns announced by several regimes across the globe to suppress the spread of the contagion, enterprises in industry verticals like life sciences, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices that need to produce “essential goods”  urgently have been affected adversely. Major categories of supplies of these enterprises procured from quarantined areas include packaging, personal protection, medical dispensers, sterilized dressing pads, cables, and active ingredients. 

What Needs to Be Done Immediately to Minimize Supply Chain Risks?

Given the supply chain disruptions facing enterprises in the manufacturing sector, the following contingency measures may be deployed on a war footing to save the lives of people and ensure the availability of goods:

First, enterprises need to create a contingency organizational structure to respond to the situation with a central leadership team at the corporate level showing the way. The central leadership team may be supported by a customer response team and most importantly a supply chain planning and operations team. 

Second, the central leadership team shall have to ensure visibility into layered supply chains. They can do so by creating a database of components that are “critical to the mission”, trace the origin and flow of procurement and explore substitute suppliers.

Third, the customer response team may be entrusted to objectively assess the available inventory, calculate quantities of spare parts and after-sales-stock to keep manufacturing up and running and ensure downstream supply chain mobility and distribution to customers. 

Fourth, the supply chain planning and operations team may be tasked with ensuring the first ring of personal safety for people by providing personal protective equipment (PPE) and collaborating with people on the production floor shop, warehouses, and nodal points in the supply chain to regularly monitor infection-risk levels. Further, the supply chain planning and operations team can do well to engage in logistics planning, identify points of risk, ensure the safety of goods during transit through effective sanitization and packaging and push for faster delivery of goods.

Recovering from the Economic Impacts on Covid 19 in the Intermediate-Term

Coming out of the Coronavirus crisis, business engagements will likely to be transformed forever. 

First, enterprises that sail through the crisis shall like to adopt some of the major elements of their contingency measures to create a supply-chain risk function team. Such supply chain risk teams may be entrusted with the responsibility to map supply chain risks continuously and provide objective assessments to aid decision making in the domain of supply chain management and oversee risk governance. 

Second, moving forward it shall be imperative for enterprises to strengthen supplier collaboration and work with entire supplier ecosystems that can provide a de-risked, geographically spread out and diverse model for global procurement. 

Third, in the aftermath of the Coronavirus crisis, as enterprises shall stagger back to a new normal, they should ideally invest in the digitization of their supply chains to augment efforts of the supply chain risk team to anticipate the road ahead. Given the impact that the pandemic has had on supplier collaborations and contract compliance and obligation management of the manufacturing sector, it shall make enormous good sense for enterprises to invest in early warning systems, forecasting tools and comprehensive contract automation software suites that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Returns from such investments in supply chain digitization assets shall manifest in the form of predictability of supplier capacity, turnaround times and rational expectations of risk factors and thus enable them to adjust their position in the market with time at hand. 

Parting Comments and Epilogue: A Window into Supply Chains Post Coronavirus

Even as enterprises across the global economy continue to grapple with the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic it is still unclear what the supply chain of the future would look like. However, amidst all uncertainties, one thing is clear: business won’t be business as usual and those that survive shall have to look at the supply chain function through a completely different lens that shall resemble the challenges and solutions of the future.

As Prof. Hua Lee, from the Department of Information and Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business has observed, it shall not be enough to know what’s happening in your supply chain. Enterprises would need visibility outside their supply chain, know the capacity of other suppliers and modes to deploy them immediately when needed. Operational hedging shall be a necessity in the supply chains of the future with global suppliers being managed by inclusive procurement ecosystems driven by vendor consolidation. Parallely there shall be a greater need to increase logistical flexibility, design alternate transit routes and expand the geographical spread of warehousing facilities.