Companies Step Up Efforts To Trim Packaging

May 29, 2007

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With Wal-Mart Stores helping to push a repackaging trend along by encouraging its 66,000 suppliers to reduce their packaging starting next year as part of its goal of cutting overall packaging five percent by 2013, companies are beginning to look at packaging, or the lack thereof, as a competitive advantage, Associated Press reports. Already, more than 3,100 vendors have used Wal-Marts online packaging scorecard system.

Procter & Gamble recently announced it would begin selling liquid detergents in double-strength concentrations that will give consumers a bottle half the former size.

Berry Plastics’ cups use less plastic than competitors through a manufacturing process the company guards so closely it forbids photographs of the machines.

Nestle Waters North America has saved about 20 million pounds of paper over the past decade by using narrower labels on its bottles and is rolling out half-liter plastic bottles weighing 12.5 grams, about 15 percent lighter than those of competitors. The company expects the new bottle to reduce its use of plastic resin by 65 million pounds during 2008, the first full year of the bottle‘?s availability.

Hewlett-Packard says new print cartridge packaging for North America will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 37 million pounds in 2007.

Dell says that its new server packaging option, called Multipack, eliminates up to half of the packaging materials and waste resulting during a typical customer installation of IT equipment.

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