A company’s first rule of sustainability should be to sustain its profits, followed by waste reduction and energy savings within its own business, according to Tony Gray, director of sustainability at Visy. He says some companies have been slow to realise that there are financial benefits from taking sustainable action
Gray says that since 2000 Visy has been named Australia's best company for environmental performance four times. He adds the company has always had sustainability at the core of its operations.
Gray says, “We have long understood that doing less with more is good business sense, for example we have realised waste reduction equals cost reduction. More than 98 per cent of Visy's packaging is recyclable and collected for recycling.”
He continues, “Sustainable action can be as simple as ensuring a machine is not running when it doesn't need to, it is important to look at the low hanging fruit within a business' operations. At the AIP National Conference last month Nick Harford, general manager environment for Visy gave a presentation saying every tonne of Visy recycled corrugated boxes saves 416kg of C02, which amounts to about 300,000 tonnes of C02 equivalent saved each year. Harford also outlines in his presentation that the packaging industry can play a big part in reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions through product design for sustainability, recycling and recycled content. He says diversion of waste coupled with recycling has the ability to save around eight per cent of Australia's greenhouse emissions.
Visy has also introduced an employee sustainability training program, which covers market trends, how sustainability affects Visy's business and what customers and consumers are looking for. More than 200 Visy employees have completed the program so far.
On par with Amcor's assessment Tony Gray says in the last 12 months there has been a substantial increase
of customer inquiries in regards to sustainability and the carbon foot print of a product.
Gray says, “We design our products with recyclability in mind, we also look at light-weighting, which uses less raw material, resulting in lower net costs to the customers. We encourage our customers to bring us into the design process as soon as possible as most customers have sustainability in mind.”
Case Study – Visy Packaging Model
Visy has developed a proprietary tool called the Visy Packaging Model (VPM), which the company says reviews primary and secondary packaging's total life cycle, considering at each step how the packaging fulfils a value-adding role.
The life cycle process includes manufacture, Logistics, quality, purchase, consumption or usage and disposal and recycling. The Role of packaging is summarised by supply chain and distribution, point of sale and promotion, consumer usage experience and environmental footprint. Visy has identified the key variables for each of these roles of packaging, allowing objective measurement of their relative importance using the VPMCalculator. The company says the VPM can be used to:
• Review existing packaging to assess its continued category relevance
• Develop an optimum packaging solution for a new product
• Explore and identify improvements required in packaging for a category
• Identify significant packaging-led category development opportunities which will deliver genuinely innovative market changes Visy claims a recent VPM pilot project with an unnamed consumer goods company resulted in several new packaging opportunities being identified in the space of a 90-minute meeting, which are now being developed further by the business.
