Edible Cups and Corn Wrappers:
Is Your Packaging as Friendly as It Could Be?

By Sarah Fister Gale

A few years ago JoEl Inc., a family owned confectioner based in Elizabethtown, PA, discovered the holy grail of business opportunities: a new product category with virtually no competition. The company has manufactured hard candies and cough drops for half a century and the owners saw organic hard candies as a natural fit for the company’s mission to be both a successful business and a good corporate citizen, says Libby Moyer, marketing and sales director for College Farm Organic, the subsidiary of JoEl that ultimately developed the new line of sweets. The organic market was growing in popularity with mainstream consumers and there were no players in the organic hard candy vertical market. “It had good business potential with a product that allowed us to be environmentally responsible,” Moyer says.

There was one catch: JoEl would only go ahead with the product line if it could find a wrap for the candy that was as environmentally friendly as the product itself. “You can’t make organic hard candy and then wrap it in plastic. That’s an oxymoron,” Moyer notes. “Finding the right packaging went hand-in-hand with developing the product.”

It’s a goal that more and more organic processors are setting for themselves—and having trouble fulfilling. While access to recycled paperboard and vegetable-based inks has grown, there is still an enormous amount of waste associated with product packaging and few significant solutions being offered. From plastic wraps for end products to cardboard shipping containers, millions of pounds of packaging materials are used and dumped every year, and not enough effort is being made by manufacturers to moderate consumption.

“A 20% reduction in waste can keep a landfill open for 10 more years,” says Michael O’Keefe, sales representative with Chapco Carton Co. in Bolingbrook, IL. But it won’t happen unless manufacturers make it a priority. “Manufacturers have to require their vendors to provide environmentally safe packaging, or the industry will go on as usual,” he says. Whether its demanding higher percentages of post-consumer content in the recycled materials, requiring soy ink at the same price as petroleum-based inks, or ordering bulk quantities to reduce waste and the energy required for shipping partial truckloads of material, demand will force supply. “If we all seek out the companies that produce environmentally friendly packaging, they’ll get rich and the word will spread and they’ll all start taking part.”

That’s exactly what JoEl did, and fortunately for hard candy lovers, JoEl’s interest in organic packaging coincided with the launch of a new alternative film wrap from Cargill Dow. The joint venture between Cargill and Dow Chemical launched in 1997, makes fibers and packaging using corn and other renewable, non-polluting resources.

At the time, Cargill Dow was searching for companies to try its new NatureWorksPLA, a polylactide polymer packaging material made from fermentable sugars found in corn and other plants. The carbon and other elements in the natural sugars are drawn off through a process of fermentation, separation and polymerization to make polylactide which is then processed into films and other plastic-like products. Because it’s made entirely from corn it can be thrown on the compost heap and completely recycled back into the environment.

JoEl was pleased with the appearance, texture and versatility of the NatureWorksPLA wrap. “It looks exactly like cellophane, Moyer says. “It has that nice crinkle and it goes through the wrapping machine really well.”

Finding the natural wrap sealed the deal for JoEl. It launched the new line of College Farm Organic hard candies in the summer of 2003, with five flavors: Vienna Roast, Chocolate Mint, Vanilla Caramel, Strawberry and Cream, and Luscious Lemon. A line of organic fruit-flavored FunPops will be released this fall. The organic candies are wrapped on a high-speed twist wrap machines, generally running about 1,300 pieces per minute.

“We hope that someday all of our product packaging will be NautureWorksPLA or something similar,” Moyer says. The material isn’t widely available in ready-made containers, so the lollipops will be packaged in a paper sack and the candies will be sold in unbleached corrugated cardboard boxes shaped like barns. While she can’t control what people do with the box once they’ve finished the candies, Moyer included the message, “Please reuse or recycle this box” in English and French on the side, and hopes that its charming design will encourage people to keep it around or use it for play or storage. JoEl also uses water-based inks in its printing and 60% recycled material for shipping cartons.

So Much More to Be Done
College Farm is great example of a packaging success story for the organic industry. The company stretched its mission of environmental sustainability beyond its products to the package they arrive in, but not all organic companies have been so successful. Recycled cardboard, soy inks and recyclable plastics are a good first step, and accepted practice for many organic companies, but it’s just the beginning of what can be done to make packaging environmentally sustainable.

The ideal goal is not just to reduce packaging waste but to eliminate it. However, finding packaging that is biodegradable, earth-friendly and nontoxic, that doesn’t cost a fortune and doesn’t disintegrate while the product is still on the shelf, remains a daunting challenge for manufacturers. While natural wrapping is great for products like hard candy, it doesn’t yet hold up well under extreme conditions, such as subzero freezers, and the cost-benefit ratio has to make business sense. “A lot of people say these solutions are coming, but they are not here yet,” Moyer says.

In the meantime, there are other companies in the organic industry that can be held up as examples of the steps that can be accomplished to reduce waste without overly affecting quality or customer satisfaction.

Less is More, Less is Better
Stonyfield Farm, the popular organic yogurt company based in Londonderry, NH, spent the last several years exploring ways to dramatically reduce its own consumption of resources as part of its ongoing effort to be environmentally responsible.

Since its beginnings in the early 1980s, Stonyfield Farm has sought ways to reduce waste and to use the most earth-friendly materials for its packaging, says Nancy Hirshberg, vice president of natural resources with Stonyfield Farm. “My job is to find ways to make a product that is least harmful to the environment, and maybe even improve it in some ways.”

That began in the late 1980s by selecting a “number two” (#2) recyclable plastic cup for its yogurt containers, and launching pilot recycling programs in communities near its New Hampshire headquarters to help spread the word about reducing waste. Number two plastics were considered the ideal recyclable, Hirshberg says, so she assumed it was the best choice for the company.

Through the recycling programs, Stonyfield collected a mountain of cups at nearby dump, but when the team went to recycle them Hirshberg made an unpleasant discovery: “Lo and behold, all number two plastics are not the same,” she says. Because blow molded bottles made with number two plastic have a different melting point than the wide mouth injection molded #2 yogurt cups, the cups couldn’t be recycled. It turned out that while most recycling services collect all #2 plastics, many of the containers are pulled out and thrown away because they can’t be effective remelted together.

Frustrated, Hirshberg went back to the drawing board.

In 1992, she came across a study from the Tellus Institute in Boston, MA, that delivered surprising information about the realities of recycling and the lifecycles of different packaging choices. Tellus found that, with the exception of PVC plastic, the lightest weight package per unit of delivered end product has the lowest environmental impact. In other words, from production through end use and disposal, the weight of the package determines the amount of environmental impact of the packaging. For example, even though glass is widely recycled, the fossil fuels used over the entire life of the glass package for its manufacture and transport exceeds the energy that goes into the manufacture and transport of a plastic container.

The study also showed that the end-use of packaging, whether it was recycled, put in landfill or incinerated, was less than 5% of the whole environmental impact of that package. More than 95% of the environmental cost of a package is in its production, including the energy used and toxins created in the manufacturing process. Focusing efforts predominantly on the “end use,” such as recycling or disposal, addresses only a fraction of the overall impact of the container.

“We had been absolutely focused on the end-use, the recycling of the containers,” she says, “and it turns out it was the least significant piece of the total impact that package had on the environment. That changed the whole way I thought about packaging.”

With the help of University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, Stonyfield began a study of the lifecycle of its packaging, from raw material acquisition to its transformation and transportation, and the impact it all had on the environment. It also investigated changes that could be made to minimize impact. This study confirmed that Stonyfield’s earlier decision to reduce the waste it produced with its packaging by switching from the number two plastic cup to a less commonly recycled number five thermoform plastic cup had been a wise move.

It would seem a contrary solution in a world where reduce/reuse/recycle has become a mantra for concerned environmental citizens, but studies proved that the number one thing a company can do to improve the environmental sustainability of its packaging is source reduction, Hirshberg says. Using a number five plastic allows Stonyfield to use cups with much thinner walls, enabling the company to reduce the amount of materials it used in its end packaging by 17%. “Annually, we prevent the manufacture and disposal of more than 100 tons of plastic, resulting in environmental savings from the decreased air emissions and resource depletion from the manufacture and distribution of the packaging,” Hirshberg says. “In addition, the polypropylene is manufactured without the use of chlorine, thus eliminating the hazards of deadly dioxin releases during manufacture and incineration, which occur with certain other plastics.”

To further reduce its consumption, Stonyfield set out to replace its plastic lid with a lighter, more friendly alternative. Hirshberg considered foil, chlorine-free poly-coated paper, or plastic wrap. The best option for the environment was the paper, but in quality control tests, the paper bled and got damp, weakening the seal and failing quality tests, she admits. Similarly, the plastic roll couldn’t hold the necessary graphics that Stonyfield needed to put on the top of the container and posed an ergonomical safety issue in the plant. She ultimately chose a foil top that although the not the most environmentally friendly choice, was a better option than the lid and met the business needs of the company. “It was a case of balancing environmental needs and criteria of packaging.”

The switch resulted in 16% energy reduction, 6% solid waste reduction, 13% less water consumed and the use of 106 fewer tons of material in the first year alone, Hirshberg reports.

Stonyfield also got rid of the six-pack package wrap, and implemented a smaller base carton. However, reducing the end product material packaging was only part of the overall solution. Secondary packaging, such as the pallets, boxes and stretch wrap used to ship the products can have many times more impact. So can the transportation costs associated with product delivery. “You could do something to reduce your primary packaging that increases secondary packaging, which could make your product delivery system more harmful to the environment,” she notes. For example, putting products in smaller but more fragile containers requires heavier boxes to protect them during transport. “You have to find the optimal balance.”

The overall changes in its primary and secondary packaging has resulted in a reduction of 500,000 lbs. of material per year—a huge amount for the small company, Hirshberg says. But it’s just the beginning. “We can’t keep pulling fossil fuels out of the ground to make or create packages that are not sustainable,” she says, noting she’s not sure what the alternative is. “For Stonyfield, it might mean when you are done eating yogurt, you eat the package or toss it onto your compost pile to return to its carbon roots.”

In the meantime, organic product manufacturers will continue to search out packaging alternatives that better protect the environment, the consumer and the product itself, and to encourage packaging manufacturers to develop products that meet all of these needs. The technology for the ultimate environmentally friendly, user-friendly, product-friendly packaging may not be here yet, Hirshberg concludes, but it’s coming. “When we start asking questions of our packaging suppliers they say, ‘No one has ever asked us that.’ Well, if everyone is asking them about this, they would know there is a market for it.”

Sarah Fister Gale is Editor of Organic Processing Magazine. Contact her at sarah@organicprocessing.com.