Greener By Design: Reducing, Remaking and Eliminating Packaging

Frito-Lay is putting out Sun Chips bags that contain plant-based materials. HP released a laptop last year that was packaged in a messenger bag. Jedlicka Design worked with the Design Resource Center to redesign Verbatim's CD spindle and memory card packaging by keeping the same type of packaging, but using fewer materials.

All are examples of ways companies are rethinking what they put products in, and what purpose packaging should serve during and after its useful life.

Frito-Lay announced its plant-based bag last month, and plans to have a chip bag on shelves by Earth Day 2010 that is made of 100 percent renewable material and completely compostable.

Where the compostable Sun Chips bag will differ from most other bioplastics is that it can be composted in home composting systems, not just industrial systems that few consumers have access to.

Tony Knoerzer, Frito-Lay's VP of packaging research and development, said he put samples of the 100 percent compostable bag in his home compost bin in Texas, and the bag was gone in eight weeks.

When questioned why Frito-Lay is slowly adding renewable materials to the bag, starting at 33 percent, instead of jumping straight to the 100 percent content bag, he explained the barrier is getting the right amount of scale.

Even if the bags don't get composted at the end of their lives, he said they have additional benefits: they were made from a renewable, non-petroleum resource and lead to fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

But expanding compostable bags throughout the rest of Frito-Lay's product lines could takes decades, Knoerzer said. "This is about recapitalizing an industry," and would include a huge turnover in suppliers, manufacturers and other supply chain players.

HP's laptop-in-a-bag was the winner of a competition Wal-Mart held for innovative packaging ideas, and the run of 15,000 laptops was carried exclusively in Wal-Mart stores, and sold out.

In comparison, though, HP sells about 8 million laptops a year, so it's a small, yet successful, case study. A couple issues with the idea that HP has encountered, said Uri Kogan, HP's global supply chain social and environmental responsibility program manager, are the questions of how to maintain variety (not all consumers will want the same bag) and how to make it affordable, since it costs more to buy the laptop-bag combo than just a comparable laptop by itself.

As opposed to those two examples being done on relatively smaller scales, Wendy Jedlicka, founder of Jedlicka Design, mentioned how the design team helped Verbatim redesign packaging for CD spindles and memory cards just by using fewer materials.

The redesign saved the company $2 million in freight costs, and its environmental impacts included using 17,693 fewer trees.

"It's really about considering what the packaging needs to do," she said, emphasizing that packaging design should be considered starting in the first phases of a product's design in order to integrate the two together.