By Joanne Hunter

Designing a package is a complicated business. You risk falling into traps at every turn, dilemmas confront you and inconsistent supply chain demands appear almost insurmountable. What follows is just one man's view from a single category of goods. But it is an important view coming from Reckitt Benckiser. Similar conundrums exercise the minds of packaging specifiers and designers everywhere and in every sphere.

According to the company's global packaging director Arno Melchoir, ease of recycling is a priority when Reckitt Benckiser selects materials for packaging household and cleaning products. He says in a particular geographical market, materials are used where the appropriate recycling facilities for those materials already exist. In addition to which all containers are expected to be easy to empty for easier recycling.

Caps, closures and dispensing systems first grab the shopper then keep a consumer's loyalty. The look, feel and function must totally satisfactory. At the same time, the volume of materials consumers has to be justified. For instance, a larger diameter cap is easier to open and close. But the smaller the diameter, the lighter the weight. Clearly there is a conflict between lightweighting and an "inclusivity" design policy.

Packaging suppliers can't expect an easy ride with the company producing brands at number one and two positions in worldwide sales. The company notes that knowledge among suppliers is generally low about environmental impacts and recycling. There's "large room for improvement" says Melchoir.

In purchasing discussions, a high quality of design and manufacture is a given and speed to market essential. The challenge is to bring on the quality ready to market in time for immovable launch "windows". This might be for Reckitt Benckiser and others supplying Wal-Mart , January and July or March and September. Miss a window and it will cost a Reckitt Benckiser brand 20-30 million euros in sales.

"So the pressure is on us and suppliers to get the packaging right," says Melchoir.

by Pack Hack

If you are a packaging journalist as a drinks industry show, you get the feeling you are at the wrong end of the business. While others are sinking carefully concocted formulations, sipping, glugging, quaffing liquid refreshment that makes hair curl, brings a glow to cheeks and in larger quantities makes heads spin, what are you, Pack Hack, doing?

You are the one - one of the few, as opposed to one of the happy or a bit merry many - in your professional capacity there only to get a taste of what the next crop of soft drinks and alcoholic tipples will be modelling.

Marketing drinks is all about getting them suitably dressed to make a meaningful shelf appearance: like a hitch-hiker holding aloft a thumb or placard to cadge a lift from a passer-by; like one trying to look cool, flirtatious and seductive to attract attention in a thronging crowd against a background of flashing disco lights. On the roadside or in the aisles; in a club or a supermarket: it's all the same thing and all about getting noticed.

Effective marketing: that's the end that brand-owners have in their sights.

But what about the means? The devil is in the detail. What does the punter really think, feel or notice about their liquid refreshment packaging. What do you care if you swig or pour from a bottle made from glass or plastic? Does it matter to you whether you drink from a straw out of a foil pouch or a paperboard carton?

Is it the format the brand filler wants largely for economic purposes or because consumers happen to have an emotional attachment to it?

Will brand-builders ever go so far as to take account of post-consumer recycling systems in the markets they are targeting? Looking at the future, will those systems and the weight of European legislation eventually dictate the materials which brand-owners specify for container and labels?

Can the giant brand-owners and powerful retailers more effectively use their influence to help sway the development of better container systems which are based on end-of-life and even end-of-waste scenarios for packaging and finally resolve the "packaging waste" issue at lowest cost and least pain for everyone?

Any answers, anyone?

What am I?

Your prize will be the satisfaction of getting the point of Jean Sprackland's verses:

DNA

I'm a strand of mirror
with a secret inheritance;
a commonplace
some have treasured like silver.

I'm a charm
light as a lover's whisper;
a wisp of strength
with the wit to remake myself.

Touch my supple fabric,
feel its sense of history.
See the glint of code,
the future sequenced inside of me.

Open me, use me, crush me if you like,
I will live again -
in your hands,
and in your children's hands.

by Joanne Hunter

The draught beer sector could be on the brink of a supply chain revolution thanks to a bag-in-box system being offered as a one-way packaging alternative to the returnable metal beer keg. The developers of BeerInBox in Germany claim it will much improve beer supply logistics and is really economical.

The idea was inspired by a small Bavarian brewery’s beer carbonator invention and developed into a total solution with transit packaging systems specialist Rapak.

Rapak, a DS Smith Plastics company based in Germany, says it will cut transport and ownership costs and release a lot of storage space in pub cellars.

The system starts with the removal of carbon dioxide prior to filling the 25-litre capacity bag-in-box. At the other end of the supply chain and at the point of dispense, the process is reversed using the Ankerbräu brewery’s patented beer carbonator.

The Anker-Beer-Carbonator is a compact piece of technology that pubs and hostelries would connect to pumps at a unit cost of around €250 (£175).

Further benefits of BeerInBox are that it can be fully emptied to cut the amount of beer waste and fresh beer quality is maintained after opening for up to four weeks.

Rapak’s general sales manager Wolfgang Krämer thinks it “a brilliant idea for a small company in Bavaria” and in particular makes sense for exporters of beer. The cost of €3 for each one-way bag-in-box made from plastic and corrugated board compares to around €75 for a returnable metal barrel, notes Krämer.

By Joanne Hunter

How does the idea of wine in a can grab you? It might not do anything for you, personally, but clubs and clubbers have picked-up-and-run with the idea. Canned wine is a lifestyle drink. Love at first slurp for the “girls just want to have fun” set, these cool little cans of fizzy refreshment fit nicely in the hand on a girl’s night out and into the average-sized handbag.

The can and the perhaps more sophisticated “bottle can” have turned wine into a drink to enjoy on the go. Metal packaging has effectively blown open the market for wine. It is being drunk in places where wine wouldn’t normally be seen and by people not yet at the stage to appreciate the nose and finer points of wine.

And though wine buffs (and probably most of the French above a certain age) might sniff at the idea, wine producers with a commercial nose must think they are on to a winner.

It’s a generational thing. Where today’s “beautiful young things” hang out, single-portion size 20ml slim-line cans of easily sinkable fizzy light wines are going head-to-head with alcopops.

Maybe it’s also a rite-of-passage thing. Alcopops are a relatively mature market and when a girl has gone through the battery of alcohol-spiked sweet fizzy pop brand ranges - twice - perhaps she’ll move on to wine in cans. How long she stays in this new phase will depend on how well the sector continues to mature in line with her taste in drinks.

But due to the high speed of change by the time the wine-in-cans market matures she too will have matured. She’ll be ready to put fizzy drinks behind her, grab a bottle and a couple of glasses and savour the wine she once sniffed at, poured from a glass or occasionally from a plastic bottle.

by Joanne Hunter

I caught up with Ecover’s “soul-keeper” at easyFairs Empack packaging industry show in Brussels in October. Officially the title that Peter Malaise holds with the market-leading maker of ecological detergents and cleaning products is “concept manager”. Refreshingly, he lives and breathes the ethos of the company and certainly Ecover will remain “true to itself” while Peter stands guard over its principles.

When we spoke, Peter had just presented as part of a special seminar series – learnShops as easyFairs calls them – on the theme of ecological packaging organised by Belgian BioPackaging, an association promoting compostable plastics from renewable resources.

The booking was timely: Ecover, showered in the past with plaudits outside of its native Belgium, in the past few days finally had been honoured with its first ever award conferred by its own country folk. Ecover beat nine other home grown Belgian companies to receive the 2007 Sustainability Award.

Peter says Ecover hasn’t had to become sustainable because it was “born” sustainable. And it isn’t jumping aboard the “green train” because it happens to be the “green engine” pulling from the front. Its DNA would if it could be coloured green.

Ecover decades ago cracked the formula for effective plant-based household products believed to work every bit as well as chemical-based options. But Peter thinks researchers and developers have a long way to go before they produce plant-based or renewably resourced material that’s practical to use for packaging Ecover products.

To meet industry standards and European regulation, the kind of products Ecover makes must have a two-year shelf life. But packages made from plant starch-based PLA (poly lactic acid) material - an alternative to using plastics derived from fossil fuels – begin degrading way too early for this to be seen as practical.

Ecover prefers to use polyethylene (PE) bottles and labels for mono-material recycling. According to Peter there is in fact a “forgotten” plant-based formula for making PE: it’s something like “polymerised gin” which you make from flax and beet for example. PE started life as a plant-based material in 1930s. It didn’t take long though before the ethanol was derived from coal and then petrol, cheap at the time.

Make PE from plant sources and you get reliable lightweight and crushproof packaging suitable even for sensitive formulae. It would also be reusable and recyclable, which bioplastics isn’t, says Malaise, who also sees a plant-based future for polypropylene.

http://www.ecover.com

Free help is being offered to small and medium sized companies (SMEs) to green up their businesses and comply with EU environmental laws. Everyone needs to learn about how to be 'greener' not just in the eyes of the law, but also to win customer and investor support and the backing of the public-at-large.

So it's worth knowing about the European Commission’s Environmental Compliance Assistance Programme (ECAP). In October 2007 it began to roll out a series of workshops across Europe - below is a list of scheduled events until early 2008 – the first were held in Poland and Belgium.

Individual SMEs employ less than 250 people yet the total number in the EU is 23 million people and represent 99% of all EU companies responsible for 57% of EU total economic turnover. Lots of companies are unaware of the impact their activities have on the environment and believe they comply with legislation unless told otherwise says the Commission. Some activities can pose health and safety risks as well as a threat to the environment, it adds.

Look out, too, for ECAP guides on waste, energy efficiency, air emissions, and soil and water, and a handbook on funding opportunities.

Business customers and private individuals, alike, are expecting suppliers to show they take seriously their responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Companies must be seen to be trying to be greener and to take active steps will make them all the more marketable.

ECAP has been given no special funding to assist SMEs to green up their processes but there are existing funds that they can apply for, namely: LIFE+ (concerning Nature and Biodiversity, Environmental Policy, Information and Communication); Compliance and Innovation Programme (CIP); Marco Polo II (aims to cut road congestion, improve environmental performance of freight transport); European Regional Development Fund (for SMEs in socially disadvantaged or outlying regions); and EU Rural Development fund.

For further ECAP information (in seven languages) visit: www.ec.europa.eu/environment/sme
http://www.rso.it/ecap/

United Kingdom
Date: 15 November 2007
Supported by: St. Helens Chamber
Workshop language: English
Venue: St. Helens Chamber Ltd, 7 Waterside Court, Technology Campus, St. Helens, Merseyside WA9 1UE
Contact: 
ecaptrainingUK@rso.it or sara.williams@sthelenschamber.com

The Netherlands
Date: 26 November 2007
Supported by: Senter Novem/EG-Liaison
Workshop language: Dutch
Venue: Juliana Van Stolberglaan, 3 - P.O. Box 93144 - NL 2509 AC The Hague
Contact: ecaptrainingNL@rso.it
or Trudy Millenaar, t.millenaar@egl.nl

Czech Republic
Date: 14 December 2007
Supported by: EIC of Pardubice
Workshop language: Czech
Venue: Mendel University of Agriculture and Forestry, Department of Landscape Ecology, Zemědělská 1, Brno
Contact:
ecaptrainingCZ@rso.it
or ulcak@fss.muni.cz

Estonia
Date: 5 December 2007
Supported by: Estonian Association of Small and Medium Sized Enterprise
Workshop language: Estonian
Venue: Tallinn
Contact: ecaptrainingEE@rso.it

Greece
Date: 14 January 2008
Supported by: Chamber of Commerce of Athens
Workshop language: Greek
Venue: Athens, Chamber of Commerce
Contact: ecaptrainingGR@rso.it
or Helen Foti, helfoti@acci.gr or Tina Mylona, industry@acci.gr 

France
Date: 17 January 2008
Supported by: CRCI Bretagne
Workshop language: French
Venue: Faculté des Métiers, Ker Lann (Rennes)
Contact: ecapFR@rso.it
For any information about the Workshop: eic@bretagne.cci.fr


Romania
Date: to be published
Supported by: Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania
Workshop language: Romanian
Venue: Bucharest
Contact: ecaptrainingRO@rso.it

The UK Government has two new allies to fight the battle to change attitudes towards recycling and recycling habits of its populace. These new powers aim to encourage (some might say, force) industrial, commercial and domestic consumers to handle all their used recyclables with due attention. True, the point needs to be driven home that reusables and recyclables are, respectively, valuable products and raw material which can cut the use of virgin resources and production energy. The hammer has come down in the shape of powers that make 'neglecting ones duty' result in a slap on the hand - in other words, "you'll pay for it!".

UK residents are going to feel the pinch in a pincer movement by Government that makes everyone in the workplace and at home aware that they need to recycle. The Government has no choice than to increase the use of recycling schemes to hit European targets and avoid being fined for not doing so. UK plans for incinerators are not progressing quick enough to be the help they could be in diverting waste from landfill.
Many small businesses don't know the rules on disposal of waste to landfill sites have tightened since the Landfill Directive became law on October 30. From now on, non-hazardous waste must be treated before being sent to a landfill site.

Companies will need to separate recyclable content in-house, or pay a waste contractor to do this. But a survey of UK small businesses ahead of the new law coming in found that 34% of them had not introduced some form of arrangement for recycling.

The rules cover household or builders' skip waste. Liquid wastes, such as those from milk or juice cartons, will be banned from landfill.

A specimen form to declare that business waste has been treated is available from the Environment Agency at www.environment-agency.gov.uk/landfilldirective

And at home, nobody 'gets away with it' either. Coming to your area soon may be the new so-called pay-as-you-throw or 'bin' tax. Toss away too much household waste into the dustbin and a top-up bill for its collection will drop on to the doormat. Councils in pilot schemes across England will be able to charge local residents according to the amount of unsorted rubbish they throw.

Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising (London, Oct 2007): An independent review by Maria Ana Neves, Design and Branding Strategist
 
There are two ways of understanding what this museum is all about:
One is seeing it through founder Robert Opie’s mind, culture and life.
The other depends on who you, the visitor, are and what motivates your visit.
 
The museum tells you how everyday life has looked through changing times, from its objects, brands, toys, sweets, packaging and communication media including billboard and television advertising.
 
To know how Mr Opie’s mind works is probably the best way to decode the various layers of information displayed in the museum’s permanent collection and exhibition: he is a collector, historian and market researcher.

His focal point is to report time’s contextual (historic, political, social) impact on products, and the reverse. How did everyday life, the political and social agenda of time, impact on toys, sweets, fashion, leisure and household products? How was the passage of time mirrored by the packaging and brand messages that depict each social milestone of British culture.

If you are one of the lucky ones, Robert himself will around as a guide to signpost different paths, help you explore connections, stories, facts and the context of each Brand, Packaging and Advertising “moment” behind the display windows.

But, if you visit on your own – which is more likely - this visit is not only a very different experience to a guided tour but a unique experience and fully depends on the individual to bring a personal focus, knowledge and motivation:
 
For a lay-person or casual visitor, it is the experience of Nostalgia: your grandparents’ house and toys, the domestic hygiene of home with your parents. Fashions of day come to mind in a blink, graphically presented within their cultural context.
 
For the professional visitor – you can either take it all in at a glance, or spend an entire week discovering the museum!

If the intention is to learn more or reflect on the collections from a specific professional angle, it will be better to ask for some help, preferably Robert’s direct input (if he finds the time for it).

But don’t look for 21st century issues to be opened up. All critical factors behind Packaging and Branding decisions and solutions, are not explicitly explored:
- design decisions: the materials and shapes, colours, usability issues, safety and hygiene constraints, ergonomics, shelf-storage-stacking and 
- production and logistics
- marketing strategies
- design discoveries and innovative ideas
- the “AHA!” moment and its creative process
- the communication, differentiation and graphic design
- and the brand story behind and around the brand: advertising 
- the teamwork, the huge investments and technology required to make Packaging and Brands work…

Does the consumer realise how much effort is put into a packaging they throw away once the product is consumed?
Would to highlight this be relevant for the average consumer who turns up as a Museum visitor?
 
So, if you are Packaging Designer, or a Brand Owner/Brand Manager, Marketer, Graphic Designer, Engineer, Retailer, it’s for you to choose through whose eyes you experience the museum.

You will make your personal decision on what to see and which layer you choose from the multitude of layers of social context: the ‘moment’ from a social and historical perspective; the whole picture including co-existing products in a particular Brand, the Brand competitors…...or you will most likely – for it’s hard not to - become a nostalgic explorer.
 
With time, maybe more space or using new technologies, Robert Opie wants to develop a focused museum guide to help the visitor, supporting the core angles (a story of a brand, the story of chocolate consumption, the evolution of packaging and brands in a market context).
 
But the world has changed, and both Brands and Packaging have new agendas:
-  Brands must now fight for a consumer’s “mind space” as well as for billboard and shelf space. Brands have a much higher and deeper role in business (responsible for being a valuable asset as well as the vital connector between target audiences, products, services and experiences, people, processes and organisations).
-   Packaging, became THE most responsible element of waste, which with the high level of consumption, has now consequences calling for urgent solutions.
-   Shopping behaviour has changed since mail order, telesales and more seriously with the online shopping, as well as responsible consumerism became a trend in which retailers and consumers are engaging with minimal and ecological friendly solutions.
      
These, brand and packaging new challenges, are obviously consequences of past decisions, therefore fully understand that past is needed, the same way the future of both, will be the result of today’s decisions.
Robert Opie has a project to address the consequences journey (today and future) from the sustainability and social responsibility viewpoint in an exhibition, to be opened next year.
 
In other words…
One of the challenges for the Museum, is to find a way to tell the stories that are still living inside its mentor’s mind!
The second is to help us to help Robert to help us when he is not there.
And the third is probably how to address the Industry problems, and increase the Stakeholders' awareness of their role and changes urgently required in this industry.
 
If you are in London, do go, with plenty of time to explore the museum…then bring your comments to the blog for a larger debate!
 
 
 

Food flown into the UK will lose its right to be labelled ‘organic’ unless it can meet proposed new stricter ethical standards.

The Soil Association is leading the move. Firms must be able to show the trade brings real benefit to developing world farmers says the association which certifies 70% of the UK's £1.9bn organic food sector.

The new rules will affect the 1% and growing part of the organic food market in the UK which is being flown in from abroad, much of it from countries with poorer economies.

The UK government fears the changes could harm African farmers and is worried about the costs of additional certification for the farmers that do meet the standards.

The Soil Association has said it won’t remove organic status from all air-freighted food, to avoid hitting producers in the developing world too hard.

The planned new measures will be put out to consultation next year and the association hopes they will become effective from January 2009.

Bio-packaging finds a natural ally in organic products which has been an early adopter and, understandably, a target market for selling “environmentally-friendly” packaging in to.
What impact the setting of obstacles to some sources of organic products could have on the development of the compostable-packaging sector is open to debate.