Is Your Business Ready For Sustainable Packaging?

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As a business owner, you are probably aware that one of the first things your customer sees when they receive your product is your packaging. How you package your product, and types of materials you use for your packaging can have a direct impact on whether or not the person continues to purchase your product. One of the latest things that customers are starting to look for in packaging is sustainability. Not only will sustainable packaging allow your company to reduce your carbon footprint, but it may also help increase sales. 

What Is Sustainable Packaging?

For most businesses, choosing packaging for their products boil down to three basic things. The packaging must be:

Functional - First and fore most, your packaging should help to identify and brand your product. It should be visibly pleasing and stand out. In addition to this, packaging has to protect the product for which it is designed, as well as meet all of the safety and regulatory guidelines that your product will encounter during storage and shipping. 

Cost Effective - Because product packaging may take place at several different places during production, it is often easier to view the various costs of the different components individually without viewing all of your packaging components as a total cost. Viewing your costs this way often leads to higher packaging cost which could add to the cost of your product and increase your bottom line. 

Be safe and environmentally healthy - While most companies would never choose packaging that would knowingly endanger the health of the public, many times the health, or the impact that excessive packaging has had on the environment has been overlooked. It has been estimated that every day Americans throw away more than 150,000 tons, or more than 10,000 tractor trailer trucks of packaging. This has a huge impact on environmental health.

With sustainable packaging, you are able to meet these three criteria along with many more. Sustainable packaging will:

• Be sourced, manufactured, recycled by using renewable energy
• Maximize the use of recyclable, or renewable materials
• Be manufactured using clean technologies and best practices
• Optimize materials and energy used throughout its life cycle
• Be able to be recovered and utilized in an industrial closed loop cycle and more

Why Is Sustainable Packaging Important?

Sustainable packaging is not just important because it impacts your bottom line, and has a major impact on the environment. It is also important because it is what your current, as well as up and coming consumers, the Millennials, are starting to look for.

This group of consumers, who measure more than eighty million strong in the US alone, represents more than $200 billion in annual buying power. Not only are they controlling their individual buying decisions, but because they are so connected and vocal, they also have an impact over the older generations as well. 

This generation is more environmentally conscious, and are better green consumers than most of the preceding generations. Because of this, more than half of them consider packaging sustainability to be important.

Four out of five of those surveyed shared that they consider packaging when making their purchasing decisions, and view your packaging materials as a part of their brand experience. Many of them are even willing to pay slightly more for your product if your product has sustainable packaging. While they still want to consume your products, they want you as a company to help them be smarter consumers and one of the places they look for this is in your packaging.

If your company has not considered sustainable materials and packaging, this may be something that you may want to consider in the near future. Your customers may already be looking for this. For more information, considers sites like http://www.apsbox.com. 

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29 December 2015