It’s Not Plastic, It’s a Plant!

By Rob Kaszubowski, CPP- Chainalytics

Chooo chooo! What’s that, you ask? That’s the great sound of another company boarding the green train. Just last month, the HJ Heinz company announced that it would partner with Coca-Cola to use their Plantbottle™ for 120 million bottles of Heinz ® Ketchup.

Back in 2009, Coca-Cola launched its PlantBottle: a fully recyclable bottle that uses an innovative process to turn sugar cane and molasses into a key component for PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. Coke initially introduced the bottle in its Dasani® water and sparkling water markets and later with Vitaminwater® in 2010. Coca-Cola’s goal is to eventually convert all of their bottles to the plant based plastic by 2020.

Heinz said that the new material will increase its packaging costs; however they hope that it will give them greater flexibility to move away from the volatile price fluctuations of petroleum based raw materials.

Since the release of the PlantBottle, PepsiCo Inc. has decided to also board the sustainability train as well. In March, PepsiCo inc. unveiled the first ever 100% plant based bottle for their products.

With any kind of packaging change, numerous steps and measures need to be taken to assure a winning solution emerges in the end, so I’m sure these changes had been in process at these companies for some time. Just think of all the design, verification and testing that had to be done to achieve their final goal: bottle design, distribution and package testing, bottling line changes, etc.

Even with all this hard work, it’s great to see companies taking that first step forward to become a leader in sustainable packaging! The packaging engineers at Chainalytics are committed to increasing sustainability in packaging through innovation so contact us to see how we help your company board the train!

The Reusable Box

By Rob Kaszubowski- Chainalytics

In today’s society, we’re constantly being reminded of the big “3 R’s” of the environment: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Walmart has even gone as far as unveiling their own “7 R’s” of sustainability. eBay has also jumped on board the green train with the R’s of sustainability as they rolled out a trial version of their own reusabke shipping box back in September, 2010.

Stemming from their annual Innovation Expo where employees are encouraged to submit innovative ideas, the reusable shipping box emerged as the top idea. The boxes are made out of 100% recycled content as a robust, die-cut style corrugated shipper The corrugated is FSC-certified and fully recyclable once they finally wear out their use.

eBay estimates the boxes to be able to be reused about 5 times, which by their numbers could help save 2.4 million gallons of water, 4,000 trees and conserve enough energy to power 49 homes.

Columbia Sportswear has also introduced a reusable box program, offering online customers the option of having their purchases shipped in a new or used corrugated box. Columbia also encourages their customers to continue reusing the box by sending them to their site aboxlife.com, which allows people to share stories and track the life of the box.