Two Kinds of Green

Some consumers believe that packagers don’t care about either the environment or reducing waste. The truth is that packagers are continuously working to decrease packaging material used while maintaining or improving functionality:

• In 2000, the 500ml PET water bottle weighted around 20 grams. In 2013, some bottlers are running bottles weighing less than 10 grams

• Twenty-five years ago beverages and other canned good typically came in corrugated cases. This has evolved through shrink wrapped sided trays, flat slip sheets until today there is usually no corrugated at all.
• Twenty-five years ago it was unusual to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical tablets without cotton padding. Today the cotton is rare.
• Half-gallon milk bottles weighed close to 40 grams in 1980. Today they weigh closer to 30.
• Coca-Cola shortened their plastic cap and reduced plastic in the bottle and cap by more than 5%.

Companies are quick to tell the consumer how green, eco-friendly and sustainable they are. It’s a good selling point and consumers need to be aware of what they are doing with their money. It is hard to fault packagers for wanting to look good. I think where some packagers fall down on this is in not explaining how they are making packages more eco-friendly.

There’s another kind of green that is the real driver behind these innovations. That is the green of money. Shaving a few grams of plastic out of a PET bottle may not seem like a big deal on first glance but it adds up. A bottling line running a million bottles every day will save over 1000kg of plastic daily for each gram of weight reduction. At current resin prices, that’s over $100,000 per year. It’s good to be green. Two kinds of green is twice as good.