Climate change is a real and ever-present threat to most living organisms on planet earth – everyone should be doing their part to mitigate this ticking time bomb. In the packaging industry, carbon footprint reduction is something that many businesses like ours take as seriously as we do servicing our clients.
There are several ways in which businesses in our industry can reduce their carbon footprint and play their part in the war against climate change. In this blog, we’re going to take you through a few of those methods in the hope that you and your business can use this knowledge to good effect.
The 3 Rs: how to reduce your packaging carbon footprint
We should all by now be familiar with the age-old ‘Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle’ sentiment that encourages carbon footprint reduction. Well, the 3 Rs are much more useful than you might think when it comes to the packaging industry, let’s find out why:
Reduce
Where possible, you can contribute to a cleaner world by reducing the amount of packaging that you use. There are three ways you can do this:
- Train your staff on efficient packaging – This one is a two-birds-with-one-stone piece of advice. By training your staff to package items efficiently, and therefore reduce wastage and unneeded excess materials being used, you can both decrease your business’s carbon footprint while saving money by using less materials.
- Consider automating – No one can really deny just how effective automation is, regardless of the job at hand. In packaging, automation will help improve the efficiency of your work, therefore reducing the margins of human error and the wastage that comes with those errors.
- Get your packaging designs right – the design, or rather shape and configuration of a piece of packaging can mean the difference between immaculate efficacy and blatant wastage. If your packaging isn’t designed specifically for the items you’re packaging, and ends up wasting valuable space, you’ll be losing out on decreased packaging costs, as well as a decreased carbon footprint.
Reuse
When it comes to reusing packaging materials, specifically in FMCG and retail packaging, reusability mostly boils down to the end user more than it does to packaging companies. This is because a reduction in carbon emissions using this strategy implies that individuals reuse their packaging rather than purchase new ones.
To that end, this also applies to businesses that need reliable packaging to store their goods. Reusing contributes towards the effort to manufacture fewer packaging materials, which ultimately results in reduced carbon emissions.
Recycle
Last but not least, the final ‘R’ in the equation highlights the importance of recycling packaging materials, whether you’re recycling finished packaging products or excess materials. Recycling uses much less energy in the long run than flat-put disposal since recycled goods will cost less money and energy to manufacture into viable materials than it will to make these materials from scratch.
Conclusion
There are so many ways that businesses in the packaging industry can reduce their carbon footprints besides the cliché ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ sentiment. If you’d like to learn more about how we reduce our carbon footprint, as well as why it makes a difference, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!