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Optimizing the packaging-sustainability alliance
 The trend of sustainability executives provides packaging professionals with opportunities for increased visibility, reliance, and clout. By Sterling Anthony
Sustainability executives: They have multisyllabic, imposing titles, that ascend all the way to vice president. Their growing numbers reflect the recognition that sustainability is a source of competitive advantage. Their job descriptions charge them with devising and implementing environmental strategies that are not merely compliance-driven but proactive and innovative. Toward that pursuit, some of the strongest allies available to the sustainability executive are packaging professionals.
But packaging professionals should not assume that their pivotal role is adequately understood by the sustainability executive; rather, they should take the initiative in forging an alliance that furthers the company's mission, goals, and objectives.
Sell the basics
Sustainability encompasses everything that the company does that impacts air, soil, water, and people; therefore, the concerns of the sustainability executive extend far beyond packaging. Still, packaging is unique, a truth that should be sold to the executive, to provide her with the perspective necessary to derive optimal value from the function.
Throughout society, packaging is ubiquitous and conspicuous, ever-visible to stakeholders, such as investors, consumers, retailers, regulators, and activists. Those stakeholders often conveniently—though not always justifiably—regard the physical packaging as an index of the company's commitment to sustainability because other company initiatives are less obvious. Whether that perception of packaging is to be applauded or bemoaned is not the issue; rather, the company should accept it as reality, in order to use packaging for strategic purposes. It's that reality that should assure packaging a high priority within the sustainability executive's plans; otherwise, the company's sustainability efforts won't have a credible "public face".
Additionally, in packaging, the sustainability executive has a communication medium that's cost-effective and far-reaching, and that can be used to convey environmental claims not directly tied to packaging. Such includes the sourcing and disposal aspects of ingredients and components; awards; memberships and sponsorships; certifications—the list goes on
Agree on philosophy
The sustainability executive's duties cut across all the company's sourcing, production, and distribution activities; hence, they are interdisciplinary and require a systems approach with its inherent trade-offs. To varying degrees, the same can be said of the duties of the packaging professional, enabling him or her to demonstrate to the sustainability professional that scope of the job and the philosophy required for success are understood.
The kindred ties can be further strengthened through a shared philosophy that sustainability is fraught with uncertainties, complexities, and contradictions. For example, there are uncertainties as to probable regulations; complexities owing to a multiplicity of SKUs; and contradictions when a drive for lower package-to-contents ratios collides with consumer demands for single-serve and portable packages. By background and experience, the packaging professional should be able to establish rapport with the sustainability executive, assuring her that he's a strong team member.
After all, decades before sustainability entered the corporate dictionary, packaging professionals were responding to environmental mandates.
And at least equally far back, packaging professionals were light-weighting, palletizing for improved cube utilization, etc. —though the reasons had more to do with cost savings ... Read more
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