'Green' packaging in Singapore

When less is often the best ...
Cutting down on packaging benefits companies and the environment
Sheralyn Tay, Today Online 3 Mar 08;

WHEN it comes to "greening" one's packaging, less is often best.

In fact, the tweaks to make a packaging more environmentally friendly are often calculated in microns — or millionths of a metre, tweaks so tiny they'd fit right on the full-stop at the end of this sentence.

Small these changes may be, but they have reaped big savings for at least three food manufacturers who are part of the Singapore Packaging Agreement, a five-year voluntary project launched last June that aims to reduce packaging waste at the source.

Such "encouraging results" received mention by the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources in the Committee of Supply debate on Friday, in which waste management was a topic of concern.

At Boncafé, all it took was to make their coffee sachets thinner by 20 microns to 120 microns, said factory manager Mr Eric Huber.

"We worked closely with our packaging vendor to find the ideal thickness for our packaging," he said. "We wanted to find a thickness that would not compromise our coffee, but one that would also cut down on waste."

The 20 micron reduction incurred no cost to implement, and has so far saved them a "very modest calculation" of at least $6,000, as well as 1,500kg of packaging material.

This year, Mr Huber expects to chalk up savings of $12,000 to $18,000. And he expects to save even more as the company looks at package reduction for their coffee filters and tea bags.

According to Mr Sunny Koh, group managing director of Chinatown Food Corporation as well as deputy chairman of the Singapore Packaging Agreement, manufacturers can look at reducing packaging in a few ways. The cheapest is to work with their vendor to make packaging thinner, as this does not require any additional cost.

Another is "right sizing the packet", he said. "Potato chip bags, for example, are only about 30 per cent chips and 70 per cent nitrogen (used to keep food fresh) … But if the bag size were reduced to about half, the manufacturer will use less material, as well as nitrogen which is very expensive."

And, while a redesign takes a bit more money to implement, the savings are also greater as there are trickle-down savings from transportation and warehousing which all charge by cubic metres. "So, if a snack food company makes all these changes, they can save a lot of money," he added.

For Mr Koh's company, thinning the plastic packaging of their range of frozen roti prata and rice balls (tang yuan) by a mere 10 microns has saved them $36,000 a year and 8.4 tonnes of plastic a year.

And it doesn't even take changes to a whole product line to be rewarded. By reducing the thickness of tin from 0.25mm to 0.22mm for the cans of their popular Milo drink, Nestle Singapore will save a whopping 9.5 mega-tonnes of tin and $12,500 a year.

According to a Nestle spokesperson, there are plans to increase efforts across the supply chain on reduction, re-use and recycling of packaging material like outer cartons.

As the "pioneer" signatories to the Singapore Packaging Agreement, all three businesses hope to set an example.

Said Nestle: "This will be a good start as other companies can be encouraged to explore and even initiate other packaging waste reduction initiatives."

Mr Huber hopes companies "rethink" their attitude towards packaging minimisation. "The sentiment is of resistance," he told Today. "I think people are aware of the need but they think it's troublesome and are afraid it won't work."

As a business, he pointed out, relooking packaging is not only cost efficient and environmentally responsible, it's also a part of business innovation and can be incorporated into branding and updating of a brand profile.