Packaging designers and engineers and material scientists at Sonoco are using the Company’s cutting-edge proprietary sustainable packaging design software to help customers reduce their packaging environmental footprint by substituting or eliminating materials, down-gauging structures and simplifying the package to improve its recyclability. Sonoco is also working with customers to reduce and ultimately eliminate landfill waste at their manufacturing facilities.
"We are working to balance the growing demand from our customers, consumers and retailers for ‘greener’ packaging with requirements for convenience, performance and price," said Jeff Schuetz, staff vice president, Global Technology, Consumer Packaging. "Retailers and consumer product companies are increasingly integrating sustainability into their business strategies and looking for Sonoco to help make those efforts successful."
Sonoco’s True Blue™ line of sustainable packaging solutions and recycling services provides customers with packages that offer a clear environmental advantage over the package they were designed to replace through the use of more sustainable materials or source reduction or because they require less energy, water and/or raw materials to produce or result in fewer carbon emissions.
For PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans, Sonoco developed and is producing vibrant, three-ply, foil-based flexible coffee bags that require 10 percent less material and 15 percent less energy to produce and result in 10 percent fewer carbon emissions than traditional four-ply flexible coffee bags.
Sonoco also helped Kraft Foods convert its Maxwell House, Nabob and Yuban® brands of coffee from metal cans to more environmentally friendly rigid paperboard containers without sacrificing abuse resistance or shelf life. Less costly and more environmentally responsible than metal, the new cans are made from paperboard that contains more than 50 percent recycled materials and has received chain-of-custody certification from the Rainforest Alliance’s SmartWood program. The move to Sonoco’s high-performance composite can bodies also reduced both brands’ environmental footprint through a material, energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
"Our True Blue brand gives consumer product customers a one-stop shop for sustainable packaging solutions," said Schuetz. "By combining our True Blue line of products with our total packaging solutions capabilities, we’re creating sustainable value for our customers."
