Greetings my packaging and sustainability friends!
I hope everyone is moving through the doldrums of winter as well as can be expected.
Today we are going to pick up on an idea introduced some time ago; that is, how to assess one’s environmental footprint to establish a baseline off which progress can be gauged. From using a blank-slate LCA tool like SimaPro to conducting an “inventory analysis” in which you monitor one environmental indicator, say electrical consumption per month, and compare that with the industry average for conversion type i.e. thermoforming, many means to this end were investigated. However, no approach considered met both our priorities and realities. Consequently, I shelved the idea, hoping to present my conundrum to other SPC member-companies at the upcoming meeting in Pittsburgh.
While at the SPC meeting I witnessed a presentation by the CEO of Ei3, which specializes in providing “cloud platforms for smart services.” Huh? He began,
For organizations that that are trying to understand and then reduce their environmental footprint, accurate and timely measurement is needed to build a successful sustainability program. Our solution meets the complex demands of calculating the global rolled-up impact of diverse operations for multi-site organizations. By using a proven architecture that is based upon our award-winning remote monitoring platform, Ei3’s Sustainability Monitoring provides enterprises with the rich set of measurement and analysis features to satisfy the most demanding requirements.
DING my ears instantly perked up; for the next 25 minutes I was completely captivated by a solution to a problem that I didn’t even know existed!
Supposedly, through a remote monitoring device I would place on Dordan’s thermoforming machines, I could determine the “carbon footprint” of our plastic clamshell and blister packaging. WHOA. This device would overlay the machine’s production rate and material type with the geographically specific utility consumption format of Dordan’s manufacturing plant AND then analyze the data in reference to existing LCA databases for plastic packaging conversion via thermoforming. Or something like that.
Do you think that the time when consumers are going to demand a carbon calculation on products and packaging is coming soon? Or, is this technology 5-10 years ahead of the game when it comes to packaging manufacturers quantifying their “carbon footprint?”
Check out the presenter’s blog post describing this amazing technology here.