Greener by Design: Packaging, Strategies and Pushing Innovation Forward

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Imagine a wine that tells a story of ecological and environmental stewardship, grown organically and biodynamically by an old family of French winemakers and is developed to bring high-quality wine to the public for less money. With a story like that, it should be an easy sell around the world.

Now, imagine the wine comes in a box.

"It was like when you see a beautiful woman, ask her out, and she says no," said Jean Charles Boisset in describing the industry's reception to his French Rabbit label. He estimated 90 percent of the retailers he approached originally rejected his wine based solely on the packaging.

Boisset, the president of Boisset Family Vineyards, illustrated the potential and the challenges of designing packaging as part of a panel on the ongoing revolution in packaging at the Greener by Design conference here.

Boisset was joined by Anne Johnson, the director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and Laura Rowell, MeadWestvaco's director of sustainable packaging and corporate stewardship. The group addressed the challenges and opportunities that face the packaging world, especially in the age of the Wal-Mart Sustainable Packaging Scorecard.

Rowell brought several examples of new trends in packaging, and explained how slightly shifting packaging design -- in this case, a multi-pack box of granola bars intended for warehouse clubs like Costco -- can dramatically drop materials use, package weight and size, and allowing to increase the efficiency of shipping these products.

Rowell said that her company's clients are actively looking for a systems approach to building sustainability into their practices, but that costs, expenditures and benefits all need to be laid out as clearly as possible up front in order to make success an achievable goal.

One-on-One with 'Green Gurus'

While the packaging panel was underway, small groups of attendees were engaging thought and industry leaders on some of the challenges they face in their operations. Among these "Green Gurus" were Jeff Renaud, GE's head of ecomagination; Dawn Rittenhouse, Dupont's sustainability director; Peter White, Procter & Gamble's head of global sustainability; and many others.

Members of these sessions said it was a unique chance to get both a hands-on look at how some of the biggest and most innovative companies on green design have developed and integrated ideas into their work, but also to have a chance to pick the brains of these leaders in addressing some of the problems that face their own everyday operations.

New Tools and Retail Strategies

Closing out the first day of the conference were two panels that explored the far reaches of green design, and a look at how the company that in some ways is most responsible for bringing green to the mainstream plans to continue forward momentum.

On the "New Tools" panel, Jason Pearson from GreenBlue, BASF's Cenan Ozmeral, and Mark Dorfman from the Biomimicry Guild explored the cutting edge technologies slowly entering the designer's toolbox.

Biomimicry and the Cradle to Cradle design process offer two new ways of looking at existing products. Biomimicry, applying designs from nature to make products more efficient and as sustainable as possible, has been responsible for a host of innovations, from paint to carpet to ceiling fans.

When asked what tools the panelists would put on their wishlist, Cenan Ozmeral, the general VP for functional polymers at BASF, said what is really needed is "a tighter definition of sustainability" -- that you can look at a car like the Saturn Flextreme (a demo model of which was on display at the conference), and say it's the greenest car around, but that's only if you're considering the tailpipe emissions. Without looking at other elements of the product like its VOC content, its recyclability or use of recycled materials, you can't begin to say whether or not it is sustainable.

This lack of a real guideline for how or why you can call a product or service "sustainable" is a hindrance to desingers and markets, Ozmeral said, Jason Pearson from GreenBlue countered that he doeesn't believe any product should ever be called sustainable: -- "Systems are sustainable, products are not," he explained.

When discussing products -- green, "sustainable" or otherwise -- Wal-Mart looms large. The company's senior vice president of sustainability, Matt Kistler, sat down with business journalism (and GreenBiz blogger) Marc Gunther to talk about how the Wal-Mart behemoth is shaping product design, packaging and the reatil experience as a whole.

Wal-Mart is a unique case in global sustainability by its sheer purchasing power. Kistler, while steadily downplaying Wal-Mart's influence in the market, offered the example of concentrated laundry detergents as a design idea that has gone from radical idea to the only solution in a very short period of time.

When Wal-Mart announced that it would only carry ultra-concentrated detergents, which reduce waste, reduce water use and lower manufacturing and shipping costs, the market as a whole shifted in response to an idea whose time has come.

Gunther asked if, along those lines, the conventional milk jug is also on its way out. Wal-Mart has begun selling a cube-shaped milk jug in some of its locations for the same reasons its moved to concentrated detergents: less waste, easier shipping, and as a result much lower costs.

With Wal-Mart looking hard at ways to encourage designers to create greener products for the retail market, Kistler said there were plenty of promising tools -- again bringing up the ideas of Cradle-to-Cradle design and a steady push toward reduced packaging for products as the leading examples.

Asked about areas for improvement, Kistler mentioned a need for products that are safer -- specifically tamper-proof packaging, but also non-toxic packaging as well -- as well as a growing need to find retail solutions for the large packages needed for small, theft-prone products. Small in size but larger in price products like memory cards for wireless devices, often come in vastly oversized plastic packages to keep them from disappearing. Kistler said Wal-Mart is working to develop a retail-side solution for moving away from these materials, but that change is slow in coming.

Tomorrow: ways that big companies are bringing sustainability on board, interviews with small companies and young innovators moving forward quickly, and much more, from day two of the Greener by Design conference.

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