Over the course of the last three years I have been privileged to share my, at times, unusual perspective on eco friendly packaging with many audiences ranging from high school students to the International Housewares Show. I truly work to make each presentation conversational and a dialogue rather than a monologue, and I would like to interact with your group.

Green Expectations versus Deliverable

It is not easy to speak for an hour or less on a subject as broad and complex as sustainable packaging. I also realize in many cases the audience can vary from the incredibly well studied and knowledgeable to someone who is just beginning their search for answers.

Sustainability can also be a very emotional topic for many people and they often come to a presentation hoping if not expecting a speaker to confirm their own firm position and opinion about a specific product or process. Anyone expecting easy, simple answers is likely to be disappointed because there are few to be found in the many complicated and constantly changing areas of packaging and sustainability.

The Cost of a Green Speaker

In most cases, the cost is minimal to free. Like anyone else I have a speaking fee chart but rarely does it apply. I often deviate from my “price list” based on the following variables:

• Who is paying the bill? Is my client a large corporation or a non for profit?
• Who is the audience and are they paying a fee to someone to be there? If they are there at no cost, I am not likely to charge for my services.
• Is the event being held in a city that I can travel to economically and does it work in conjunction with my other travel plans?
• If not, are travel expenses being reimbursed?
• Is there an opportunity for me to engage with members or participants at a conference or meeting? Picture me at a roadside holding a 100% PCW corrugated sign that reads: “I work for contacts”.

If you have an event coming up and are interested in having a green speaker as part of your agenda, give me a call. If the “fit” is right for both of us, I think you will find my thoughts and content a little different from the usual approach to the important but somewhat dry topic packaging sustainability.

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Eco Friendly Packaging Materials
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The nouveau green packaging industry loves to talk about biodegradability, recyclability, compostability, recycled content, PLA, PCW and a constantly growing variety of green acronyms. They are also just as eager to debate which product or process is best for the customer and for the environment.

We ourselves are helping to lead the charge on reusable and recycled content packaging products but often times we all over look the easiest sustainability “R” of all and that is reduce. Packaging reduction opportunities are usually very simple to identify and almost always even easier to correct.

A Perfect Example – A Recent Shipment from Zappos.com

Zappos.com is a terrific company and one of my personal favorites but the recent order (photo) we received from them caught my attention. The box they used to ship our order of baby shoes is obviously more than two times larger than it really needed to be.

To be fair, it could have been almost any internet retailer, shipping almost any order and most of them are indeed guilty of this same sustainability crime. I realize it is possible the packer simply selected the wrong size box but having reviewed and assessed many order picking and packing stations; I know the correct size box is usually not available for the packer to utilize.

“Use the smallest box available” is the common direction a packer receives but the smallest box available is frequently not the right size for the application and product being shipped. Using an oversized box obviously adds packaging material cost as well as much more difficult to calculate costs such as storage space, shipping cube space, fuel costs, load inefficiencies, etc. Perhaps even more important, it just plain looks wasteful to an ever vigilant eco conscious consumer. (more…)

Use promo code GLOBE for a 15% discount on your purchase at www.MotherTongues.com – valid till 8/30/2010.

Interview with Michelle Hamman of MotherTongues

The green community is blessed with many kind hearted and dedicated people eager and willing to make a difference. Every once in a while we are fortunate enough to meet a person and organization that really stands out in that crowd. One of them is Michelle Hamman and her company MotherTongues.

DS: Michelle, before we start talking about your business, please tell our readers about your background and home life including the transition from professional, to stay at home mom and entrepreneur.

MH: Dennis, thank you for letting me tell the MotherTongues story. I made the transition from electrical engineer to home based entrepreneur when our daughters were 1 and 3, and it was getting too difficult to keep up with changing diapers, coordinating naptime and working from home. As a bilingual person, language is important to me and so too the differences that are embedded in culture. MotherTongues began when my husband and I explored the riches different languages and cultures offer. The company has just grown from there.

DS: Your company is very unique in a market crowded with “message apparel” companies. Please explain to our readers how yours is so very different.

MH: I research words that have no direct English translation and print them with poetic and symbolic descriptions on t-shirts, socks, aprons, scarves, and tote bags. The values of community, peace, justice, and ecological well-being contained in the words are definitely unique! People wearing MotherTongues apparel show their “philosophy of life.” One’s worldview is not related to one’s age and MotherTongues clothing is worn by 4-year-olds to 80-year-olds!

MotherTongues is a fair labor, organic cotton apparel company. This combination is uncommon, but important to me since MotherTongues nurtures the earth as well as its peoples.

DS: That of course leads us to the story and meaning of your very first, and to date most popular tee shirt – Ubuntu

MH: Ubuntu is a very unique Zulu or Xhosa word from my “mother country”, South Africa. Ubuntu is a term for humaneness, for caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation. In “No Future Without Forgiveness” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says this about the concept of ubuntu: “Africans have a thing called ubuntu. It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world. It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the extra mile for the sake of another. We believe that a person is a person through other persons, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. Therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”

Hospitality, humanity, community, belonging…. Aren’t these meaningful and beautiful values that we can all relate to and learn from? (more…)

Even in the day of electronic media, we are still constantly bombarded by printed promotional messages because they work. Our attention is caught by the window sign introducing a new product, a poster announcing a sale, or a banner proclaiming a grand opening of a new location.

What all of these have in common is that they are temporary and unfortunately, usually discarded after their brief use. That is a tremendous waste of resources, including ink and substrate such as paper, plastic or even canvas.

The Good Green News

What is most encouraging is the fact that retail operations and printers are beginning to see this unnecessary waste and avoidable expense. The focus is shifting to “washable” inks and reusable substrates so that the same sign, banner or poster material can be used over and over with no deterioration of image quality. Neat stuff! Especially if your retail marketing plan includes a quarterly “Going Out of Business Sale” and you like a new look for each “Once in a Lifetime” event.

How the Globe Guard Reusable Box Can Help

Reclaiming and reusing that banner or sign is not difficult if you have a store or two. But what if your sale or promotion includes 2,300 retail locations scattered around the country? Think about all of the waste and cost that creates, as well as the potential confusion if they were returned to a reclaim or reverse logistics facility? (more…)

At a recent conference I attended as I was walking the show aisles, I was handed an “eco friendly reusable bag” by one of the exhibitors. As you can imagine, that always gets my attention, plus by that time, I was carrying sufficient items and information, to be grateful for a bag.

What the Green Supplier Wants You to See

We’re not going to get into the bag manufacturer or even the exhibitor that was handing the bags out, because it could have been one of many different suppliers who put a bright spotlight on the green speak and intentionally places the questionable details in the dark.

What the bag supplier chose to make highly visible is “80% post consumer waste” which was printed in large, bold letters on the side panel of the bag. “Pretty impressive,” I thought, knowing that rarely are non-woven reusable plastic bags made out of that high a recycled content, especially of PCW recycled content. “Certainly this bag must be domestic”, I guessed, knowing that as bad as we are about recycling our post consumer plastic waste, other countries are even worse.

I walked the rest of the show, carrying and displaying my “eco friendly reusable bag”.

Green Should Be Beautiful on the Inside, Too

The following day when I emptied my bag, I looked at the two small labels inside and the incredibly tiny print on them. At very close inspection I realized the bag was made of 100% polypropylene and that it was manufactured in China. “Hmmm. That doesn’t sound right,” I thought, recalling the 80% PCW claim printed on the outside of the bag.

I have been told by people who import low cost plastic bags on a daily basis that many Chinese and other foreign manufacturers will gladly sew in any labels you want with any message you want. They are not inclined to allow the truth to get in the way of a good, green message. Their job is to manufacture products as inexpensively as possible and deliver it on time.

It does not take a chemist or mathematician to figure out that if this bag is 100% polypropylene and 80% post consumer waste as they claim, 80% of the polypropylene waste was something else before it was collected, re-processed and re-extruded into a reusable, non-woven polypropylene bag. Here in the US, polypropylene is used mostly for drinking straws, yogurt cups, medicine bottle, ketchup bottles, and other food related packaging uses.

What is the Truth about Plastic Recycling and Use? (more…)

Converted into what? A form or shape that is easier and faster to use such as a bubble pouch, bubble sleeves or bubble bags.

Saving the planet is obviously good but sometimes reducing packaging costs can be the difference between profit and loss. Saving time may also prove to be the difference between meeting an important customer deadline or disappointing them.

Converting Bubble Packaging on an “As Needed” Basis

As many different sheets and bubble sizes as we have available, there are times when a flat sheet of bubble is NOT the best packaging option. Sheets can lead to wasted material and manual wrapping can be costly in terms of labor.

With the use of a compact and inexpensive bar sealer a sheet of bubble packaging can be easily converted into a sleeve, open end pouch, pouch with a closing flap, or even a full enclosure. While our bubble packaging is tinted green to make its biodegradability obvious, most users don’t realize how easily it can be sealed into just about any form or shape for easy and quick packaging use.

Envision creating a sleeve that you can easily slip over a bottle or tubular shaped product. Or making pouches of almost any size to fit your variety of product sizes. Now imagine being able to save substantial time and money with all of the wrapping, cutting and taping that can be reduced if your bubble packaging conformed to your product like a well fitting, protective glove.

Converted Bubble Packaging for Larger Volume Applications

(more…)

Eco Bags is one of our newest customers but I think most would agree they are not band wagon jumpers in the area of reusable or sustainable packaging. In fact, they are often credited as having helped to build the wagon for others, because they’ve been suppliers of reusable shopping bags and other green products for over twenty years. They know green and live it on a daily basis including reusing packaging as often and in every way possible.

Reusable Green Products Deserve Reusable Green Packaging

A quick look at the Eco Bags website shows a wide variety of reusable and eco friendly products designed to help heal and preserve our planet. They offer beautiful stock and custom products in many shapes and colors from domestic manufacturers as well as other parts of the world.

Importing product makes the reuse of factory packaging a challenge because the quality and standards in other parts of the world of some packaging products such as corrugated shipping boxes, are not high as ours. Importing also means the product and packaging have to make a long trip by boat with additional handling at both ends of the voyage. The end result is that in some cases (photo shown above) the poor quality packaging does not hold up nearly as well as the high quality products Eco Bags imports.

Keep in mind that even when the foreign packaging survives the trip to Eco Bags, it will likely require additional shipment to a distribution point, fulfillment house, or even to a retailer. The product may also be custom printed which typically results in additional handling, shipment and repacking.

When Reusing Packaging Is Not Possible

(more…)

Our Green Packaging Newsletter will be coming out next week and it will feature several deals available exclusively for newsletter subscribers. They will not be offered anywhere else or as part of any other promotion. The deals are so good that this offer cannot be combined with any other sale or discount.

Why Are We Offering Sustainable Packaging Bargains?

Our goal is to make our newsletter a great resource for information and to help green minded business people learn about products and methods to save money while delivering a greener package to their customers. Most of what we do has the potential to help reduce costs long term and in some cases, dramatically, but we are also eager to provide immediate savings and positive bottom line results.

To that end, we have decided to offer a minimum of FIVE exclusive deals on every newsletter we publish that will require a promo code and the only place to get that promo code is on our newsletter.

Current Packaging Deals Available with the Newsletter Promo Code:

• 100% PCW recycled content GG 26 – 4” X 4” X 4” RSC style boxes for $3.00 per bundle of 25 boxes.
• 100% PCW recycled content GG 27- 5” X 5” X 5” RSC style boxes for $4.00 per bundle of 25 boxes.
• 100% PCW recycled content GG 38- 9” X 6” X 2” RSC style boxes for $5.00 per bundle of 25 boxes.
• 100% PCW recycled content GG 39- 13” X 13” X 6” RSC boxes for $12.60 per bundle of 25 boxes.
• 100% recycled content GGMT772 – 7” X 7” X 2” die cut, front lock mailer for $16.00 per bundle of 50 boxes.

How to Subscribe to our Globe Guard Products.com Newsletter

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Just go to our New Account/Newsletter Signup page.

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You do not have to buy anything and we promise to not fill your mail box with electronic junk mail. Our newsletter is published approximately every six to eight weeks with brand new, exclusive offers, and that is about the only time you’ll hear from us.

Please call us at 815-609-3600 if you experience any problems signing up or have any questions about us, our products or our newsletter.
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Visit the Globe Guard ® Green Packaging Store for -

Green Shipping Boxes
Eco Friendly Packaging Materials
Discounts on Eco Friendly Shipping Supplies

Learn more about the Globe Guard ® Resusable Box

It has been interesting to see the development of the green printing industry, which now goes way beyond using vegetable based inks and FSC certified or high recycled content papers. Eco conscious printers are not just concerned about the materials they use, but also about the waste and byproducts of the printing process.

Green is a Never Ending Continuous Improvement Project

The fact is that the graphic arts industry has been one of the greenest packagers for as long as I can recall. For example, while most companies shifted from plastic to paper tape for reasons of convenience, printers new that their heavy boxes filled with valuable printed materials, were much more secure when sealed with water activated paper tape. They also led the way with paper void fill products that traditionally have been made with 100% recycled content.

Unfortunately, the one area where most printers have been lacking is the most obvious one and that is the shipping boxes they use. They use some unusual sizes and historically, no one has ever produced and stocked green boxes in standard printers’ sizes. That is, until now.

Globe Guard Products Now Stocks 4 New Box Sizes for Printers

Our 100% Globe Guard boxes are now available in the following sizes:

• GG11 – 11.25” X 8.75” X 6” high, 32 C Kraft, Plain RSC shipping box
• GG44 – 11.75” X 8.75” X 4.75” high, 32 C Kraft, Plain RSC shipping box
• GG45 – 11.75 x 8.75 x 8.75” high, 32 C Kraft, Plain RSC shipping box
• GG46 – 17.25 x 11.25 x 8” high, 32 C Kraft, Plain RSC shipping box

These four printer sizes like all Globe Guard RSC style shipping boxes are printed on the bottom with the “Globe Guard 100% recycled (PCW) content” logo informing your green minded customers that you use a green box, by choice.

Globe Guard Boxes and More!

Of course we also carry a full supply of water activated paper tape, paper void fill such as Kraft, bogus, newsprint and indented and now even oxo-biodegradable stretch film for printed products shipping on pallets. You’ll also find a wide assortment of corrugated mailer designs, as well as padded and unpadded plastic, and paper mailer envelopes.

Branded, custom printed boxes and tape are our specialty, so don’t hesitate to ask us about those products too. Remember, if you don’t see the size you need, let us know and it may become our next new stock box size.
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Visit the Globe Guard ® Green Packaging Store for -

Green Shipping Boxes
Eco Friendly Packaging Materials
Discounts on Eco Friendly Shipping Supplies

Learn more about the Globe Guard ® Resusable Box