Valpack: how to improve the sustainability of your packaging

By Sam Dove, Valpak Commercial Account Manager

Valpak's Packaging Analysis service has been designed to maximise the environmental efficiency of packaging by ensuring the optimal use of materials and attempting to minimise weight.

The process takes on two fundamental forms:

• Sustainability benchmarking – to identify ways to optimise packaging sustainability through alternate material use or light-weighting
• Commercial benchmarking – to highlight opportunities for maximum commercial cost savings through packaging alterations

Our Packaging Analysis service can assist in product development, during a product launch, or can assess existing product lines.

Product development

For product development, packaging analysis involves the assessment of packaging options from several perspectives, including:

• the sustainability of the packaging related to its weight and materials
• the packaging's recyclability
• the costs the packaging will incur as a result of Packaging Waste Regulations, particularly looking forward to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging Regulations coming in the next year
• any labelling requirements on the packaging

Valpak can help assess packaging during development and, through a combination of data assessment and expert consultancy, advise companies on how to maximise their packaging's sustainability and minimise costs.

Furthermore, during a product launch, Valpak can help collect data related to a product and its packaging to monitor progress and ensure fees incurred are accurate. This information can be recorded via Valpak's Product Data Hub.

Assessing the sustainability and cost efficiency of packaging

Finally, Valpak's Packaging Analysis service can investigate existing product lines to assess the sustainability and cost efficiency of the packaging. This is done by comparing the packaging associated with a product to multiple similar products across our vast product and packaging database. From here, the packaging can be judged against the "best in class" for that product type, as well as the class average.

Companies can then use these comparisons to establish packaging alteration strategies. To assist with this, our data team can conduct "What If" modelling, to assess the impact (both in terms of costs and sustainability) of altering the packaging of a product based on the benchmarking results.

Improve packaging sustainability

Overall, Valpak's Packaging Analysis service works to help companies improve the sustainability of their packaging at various points during its life cycle, from packaging development to assessing its impact when on the market. This can help reduce the negative environmental impacts of a company's packaging waste, whilst also helping to reduce compliance costs associated with Packaging Waste Regulations.

This article was originally published by Valpak.