Why 5mm is a huge leap forward

We are increasingly facing challenging questions from our customers and about our commitment to sustainability and ethics. Along with most businesses, we have to prove we are working well on every level – and rightly so. The question we want to ask is this: can we use the often-quoted sports doctrine of marginal gains to make sustainability a key characteristic of the way we do business?

Team GB took on the rest of the world in Rio 2016, finishing the Olympics as the second best nation – a stunning rise from where it found itself in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, coming 36th in the medal table. One of the contributing factors for this rise in the world rankings was a focus on marginal gains; making incremental improvements to every area of performance rather than one-off big changes in.

As Europe’s leading supplier of consumer and secondary packaging, we can use our size and scale to make a significant and measurable impact on our waste footprint in a way that smaller firms cannot.

Marginal gains become multiplied by the size of our organisation into significant gains for our sustainability parameters, and we want to lead the way in setting the highest standards for the European packaging industry. We are unashamed to shout about the ethical benefits of being a global corporation – there are no principles without profit.

We want to use innovation to drive sustainability improvements by looking at the marginal gains to be had from better quality and more efficient packaging.

Our experience with one of our customers has put this theory to the test: we shaved 5mm off their standard secondary pack, and when this was multiplied by the amount of space saved per pallet, and hence pallets per lorry, this 5mm change equated to 20 fewer lorries on the roads per year, and consequently an annual reduction in the customer’s carbon footprint by 100 tonnes – alongside substantial cost savings.

We were proud of this 5mm change. Sustainability, innovation and profit go hand in hand – better and more efficient packaging equates to less waste and hence cost-saving.

Packaging exists to protect items being transferred along the supply chain, all the way to the point at which they are consumed by the end user – be it a box of eggs or a mobile phone. Put simply, it’s our job to ensure this protection happens – if the item becomes damaged that results in greater waste for all parties. We see sustainability happening through incremental steps rather than massive disruptions to processes. It is evolution not revolution – reducing pack sizes by a few millimetres is really just the start.