Hey guys!
Happy belated Earth Day! I feel I would be remiss if we didn't commemorate this day with a montage to Mother Earth's beauty. Click here to celebrate the majesty of our planet.
Julian, my nephew and eldest son of Dordan Sales Manager Aric, did a presentation on Dordan for a school project (awesome). Yesterday for Earth Day he and his classroom came to tour Dordan to observe thermoforming in REAL TIME and learn about “sustainability.” It was radical; brought me back to my Chicago Chocolate tour-guiding days.
While preparing for the tour and presentation, I asked Julian (he’s 11) if he knew what the word “sustainability” meant. He didn’t, which was interesting considering he knew I was Dordan’s “Sustainability Coordinator” as per his presentation on the company the week prior. Do you know about the carbon cycle, I asked? Another no. What about recycling? Ding ding ding, his eyes lit up. Alright, I thought to myself, if they understand the concept of recycling as a continuous loop (no pun intended) where materials are reused again and again then I can use that as introduction to the carbon cycle and conclude with my favorite sustainability analogy, the cherry tree. Hurray!
I wanted to make these ideas tangible to the kids so I presented three Dordan packaging case studies, if you will, that demonstrate this idea of mimicking earth’s biological processes in product design, use and disposal: recycling plastic bottles into thermoformed containers, using algae waste instead of fossil fuel as the feedstock for plastic, and, using mushrooms for packaging. In each instance, though to different degrees, the idea of carbon cycles was provided as the template on which these innovations hang their hats. In reducing “sustainability” down into a simple scheme of carbon accounting, I believe its fundamentals were communicated in a digestible format, ideal for those learning about “sustainability” for the first time.
And by George I think they got it! I showed them the algae-plastic thermoform, explaining how instead of using fossil fuel as feedstock for plastic, we can use waste products, like algae, to reduce the amount of fossil fuel needed for manufacturing traditionally synthetic products. I showed them my Green Manufacturer cover story and explained how plastic bottles and thermoforms can now be recycled into second and third generation packaging and products. And, I showed them Ecovative’s protective packaging material Ecocradle, which utilizes the biological processes inherent in mushrooms to literally grow packaging to replace Styrofoam and other foamed synthetics. Always a fan of Show N Tell, I passed samples of these materials around the room, watching the kids react to the smell of the algae plastic and the feel of the mushroom packaging. It was funny. All in all, I think the kids learned something about sustainability and got to play with some funky new stuff, a successful day for any 11-year-old.
Below are photos from the tour. We began in Dordan engineering, learning about how we design products and packaging in 3D, sort of like designing video games.
Then to the tooling department, where we learned how the package designs engineering develop transition into aluminum thermoform tools for producing quality plastic packaging.
Then Aric explained the process of thermoforming...
We showed them what plastic manufacturing looks like, and in this picture you can see the insides of one of our thermoforming machines; we disassemble and reassemble each one of our thermoformers annually to maintain the highest of performance standards.
We frolicked through the warehouse, where we learned how we ship our products to customers for assembly prior to arrival at their favorite retail outlets. We also watched one of our fork-truck operators pick up a penny with a fork lift, one of the cooler things I have ever seen.
We concluded the tour obviously feeling pretty cool.
Earth Day + cute kids = good times for all.
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