Design better packaging

Image courtesy: Nestlé

I have with great curiosity studied the new tool “Compass“  from the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, SPC.

The tool offers designers to compare the environmental impact of various packaging design scenarios based on European or US data.

This is indeed an extremely relevant tool for a great amount of designers and packaging decision makers. That is at least my impression after having attended the conference “Sustainable packaging Innovation & design”, organized by ENG (European Networking Group) in March 2009.

Brand owners (and designers) now need to argue the sustainability of their packaging choices, but they are left alone, as no tools really exist for that purpose. So I am sure they will welcome this initiative!

The tool is available upon subscription but can be evaluated for free for a limited period of time.
I welcome the tool, BUT I am also very concerned that the data delivered from the tool is too general to be really useful.

Everybody involved in Life Cycle Assessments – LCA – constantly stress how difficult it is to compare packaging from the various packaging industries. A clear standard for comparative calculations still needs to be defined. The only standard I know of so far is the PAS2050 developed by Carbon Trust in the UK. PAS2050 was released earlier this year and is right now being evolved further on the European scene.

As part of a packaging manufacturing company, who was among the first in the packaging industry to develop a tool to calculate the carbon footprint of our products, I know that this is a long and tricky road to enter.

One major problem being to get the assumptions right, and another one to handle the country specific systems for waste handling and recycling (just to mention a few!).

The Compass tool uses average industry data, which may return completely wrong figures. Just as one example a country’s type of energy supply will influence a lot on the footprint calculation. Is the energy supply coming from a nuclear plant or a coal fired power plant? The calculation will turn out completely different!
For a packaging manufacturer with a major footprint deriving from the energy usage in the production, the result from the Compass tool may hence be very far from reality.

As this is not taken into consideration in the Compass tool the figures from the tool must be observed and used very carefully.

The general scope of Compass is right, but is it useful? The data being far too inaccurate compared to the data we get from our own tool. Would you make a packaging decision based on such average data?

I believe this is a step in the right direction. And I do hope that the people behind Compass will take it even further. A suggestion from my side would be to allow participating industries to enter their specific data and hence avoid any misinterpretations.

Otherwise it remains a gadget – a tool for fun – and we need more than that!

Want to read more – click here!