Green Packaging: Losing Weight
Reducing a package’s weight can be better for the environment—and your budget.
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorLightweighting is now a common industry term to describe the practice of reducing a package’s weight by using less material to produce it. This practice is most frequently used for plastic bottles, jars, tubes, or closures.
When a plastic package is lightweighted, less resin is used during the molding process. In addition to helping the environment by using less packaging material, lightweighting can also provide practical advantages, including a reduction in the cost of materials.
More Interest from Beauty Companies
Many suppliers say that beauty brands are expressing interest in lightweighting, especially for mass-market personal care products such as skin care products sold in plastic bottles and jars.
A bottle or a jar is usually considered easier to lightweight than an injection-molded component, according to Don Forbes, branch sales manager, TricorBraun (St. Louis). Forbes recently worked with one major beauty company to lightweight a plastic jar. TricorBraun has a New York–based engineering group in Buffalo that helps customers to determine if a package can be lightweighted.
Michael Hoard of Alcan Packaging (New York City) says that lightweighting also works great for tubes. “Our tubes and Slender cap family are perfect examples, especially when combined with a down-gauged tube sleeve,” says Hoard. These types of tubes are frequently used for personal care products.
DeAnn Umland, product manager for personal care and household, Seaquist Closures (Mukwonago, WI), says, “Lightweighted closures address environmental and sustainability concerns. We believe that it’s our responsibility to make closures that require less energy to manufacture, less fuel to transport, and less raw materials to produce,” says Umland. Newly designed caps developed by Seaquist Closures have resulted in 8 to 27% reductions in plastic, according to Umland.
More beauty companies are also considering lightweighting now as a way to rank higher on Wal-Mart’s Packaging Scorecard, says Marny Bielefeldt, marketing manager, Alpha Packaging (St. Louis).
Forbes agrees that Wal-Mart’s scorecard has been causing an increased interest in lightweighting. “My customers are all asking, ‘How can we make it better, faster, stronger—and lighter?’” says Forbes. “Today, no one wants to overpackage. Lightweighting provides a way to be greener, and it also reduces costs, so there’s no reason to not consider it.”
Cost Savings
When a company is selling product in high volumes, saving a small amount of resin for each package can add up. “If you’re selling significant volumes, then lightweighting will add up to a significant reduction in materials and costs,” says Forbes. “I’m definitely seeing more interest in it now, mainly because resin prices are at an all-time high.”
Robert Zurek, director of marketing, Continental Packaging Solutions (Chicago), says, “Small reductions, like reducing a package’s weight by just a few ounces, will result in the use of a lot less material and resources during the manufacturing process. It could add up to a major cost savings.”
Zurek adds, “A lot of organic and natural product companies have been asking me about lightweighting because they’re looking for ways to make more-sustainable packaging claims. Companies that are truly committed to environmental efforts are spearheading this movement toward lighter packages.”
Bielefeldt advises also considering the amount of money that can be saved on shipping, since less fuel is needed to ship lighter loads. “If you reduce the amount of resin needed to mold a 4-oz PET jar by just 10%, a truckload of empty jars will be 889 pounds lighter,” says Bielefeldt. (See how Bielefeldt came up with this number, at left.)
Forbes worked with one if his customers a year and a half ago on a project to lightweight a plastic jar that was being used for a major mass-market skin care product. “At that time, sustainability wasn’t a driving force for most companies. The intended goal was to achieve a reduction in costs. The reduction in materials did also make the packaging more environmentally friendly, however, as an added benefit,” says Forbes.
The original jar and cap had been designed as heavyweight components—a style that many companies might be rethinking now. “Since we weren’t the previous supplier of the jar, we looked at its shape and our ability to replicate it as closely as possible. We determined how it could run as economically as possible,” says Forbes. “We also wanted to make sure that the customer wouldn’t have any indication that anything about the package had changed.”
The molding process had to be modified in order to reduce the amount of resin needed for the jar and cap. “We used strip-molding as opposed to unscrewing when injection molding the jar’s cap,” says Forbes. “We lightweighted by bumping a strip off of the core of the mold, which modified some of the cap’s threads. This allowed us to use less resin in the core of the mold.”
Limitations and Challenges
“Lightweighting is one of the quickest things a company can do to make a package more sustainable,” says Suzanne Fenton, director of marketing, TricorBraun. However, depending on the package and the product in it, it’s not always that simple.
Lightweighting is not something that a supplier can always do that easily, according to Bielefeldt. “It always takes some amount of engineering to make sure that a lower amount of resin will distribute correctly and that a uniform wall thickness will be achieved, if you’re talking about lightweighting a bottle,” says Bielefeldt.
Sometimes a bottle’s shape will have to be modified in order for lightweighting to be possible. Square or oblong bottles can be a little trickier, according to Fenton. “Containers with sharp edges can be more challenging to lightweight because you have to be concerned about wall thickness in the corners.”
Food companies, rather than beauty companies, have had an easier time lightweighting because food package shapes tend to be more generic, according to Zurek. However, he says that lightweighting can be tried with any package. “As long as a package is reengineered correctly, you should be able to keep all of the same design characteristics for most bottle shapes, and there won’t be a noticeable difference in the feel of the bottle,” says Zurek.
Deciding how light you can make a container always depends on what type of product will be in it. Forbes says that if a bottle is too light, it could collapse.
Zurek agrees. “If lightweighting is taken too far, a rigid bottle will become flexible,” he says. “Testing always needs to be done to make sure that the barrier properties are still there and that a thinner layer of plastic isn’t allowing air to penetrate through the container to the formula,” he advises.
Forbes also emphasizes the importance of stability testing. “Ultimately, the responsibility lies with the beauty manufacturer to put the product in the new container and make sure they’re satisfied from both a shelf-stability standpoint and a processing standpoint.”
How Light Can You Go?
When you’re working with a supplier on a custom package and you’re building your own custom tooling, you can make decisions about a package’s weight from the start. When you’re opting for a stock package, most suppliers have already decided on the best weight for that container—and limited weight options are available. Even if a supplier has already determined a set weight for a stock package, “everyone should still ask his or her supplier, ‘Is this the lightest weight we can do?’” advises Fenton.
When it comes to stock packaging, a supplier will often choose the weight that offers the best protective capabilities at the most reasonable cost. “In the past, more suppliers probably favored packages that were a little heavier than they needed to be, just to ensure that there would be no issues, but we may start to see this change now,” says Fenton. For instance, a supplier may have tested a 13-g bottle, but will decide to make it 15 g as a matter of caution. “This is a case in which customers should be asking their supplier, ‘Can we work with 13 g instead?’” says Fenton.
Testing each product and package on a case-by-case basis will always be the best way to determine whether or not a package can be lightweighted. Guidelines don’t really exist because every product has different requirements. “There are general capacities for different bottle shapes. You’d expect an 8-oz high-density oval to fall within a particular range, but it’s still always going to depend upon the product that is going into it,” says Forbes.
More on Green Packaging
Features:
Web Exclusive: The Big Green Picture
Sidebars:
Lightweighting: Not for Cartons?
Lightweighting Options
Products:
Green Products
Web Exclusive: More Green Products