CEOs spill their sustainability secrets
TerraCycle tom szaky Include USA
In 2014, Mark Lefko began writing a book on global sustainability to capture the knowledge and best practices of sustainable businesses. The book sought to prove how global sustainability is shaping the growth of the most progressive profitable multinational, Fortune 500, middle-market and startup companies around the world.
The following chapters highlight interviews with leaders discussing strategies for diverting food waste, developing sustainable agriculture, recycling and creating better packaging. They are meant to inspire other CEOs and executives to participate in the sustainability movement and evolve their organizations.
Package lightweighting
Pacific Seafood’s Greenshield boxes are an example of a growing practice known as "package lightweighting," which means exactly what the term suggests. Honest Tea’s Seth Goldman recommends this practice, not just because it benefits the environment by cutting down on the amount of plastic used, but also because it’s cheaper.
"We’ll certainly look for packaging savings," said Goldman. "My point of view on the packaging in general is that its value is neutral. And if I can lightweight my packaging, that’s a good step for our business financially as well as environmentally. I’m happy to look for the cheapest sustainable option I can find."
TerraCycle’s Tom Szaky agrees, although he finds the subject to be a bit more complex.
"So the idea of the circular economy when it comes to consumer goods is, how do you make the packaging easier to recover and put right back into the same product? That is a simplified example, but every major consumer-product company in the world is lightweighting their packaging. They are using fewer resources to make the package, which has a very good short-term sustainability story to it, without question. There is less resource use. However, when you move away from a glass jar to package your pasta sauce in a sachet, you have used fewer resources, but you have also made it significantly less recyclable. This is the challenge. There is huge discussion about sustainability and its derivatives, and about what constitutes a circular economy, and so on. But what actually happens, in many cases, is not what is being discussed. That is the part that is the overall challenge.
"So it is a journey. We need to keep showing as many strong case studies as we can, but there are huge forces out there … that we have to contend with."