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00 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2011PM40010868 R10907 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to 4580 Dufferin St., Suite 404, Toronto ON M3H 5Y2
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IT’S A BIG, WIDE WORLD OUT THERE
The next generation of packaging went ondisplay June 21 to 23 at PackEx, a bien-nial tradeshow of sector software, hard-
ware and services, billed as Canada’s largestsuch exhibition, now in its 35th year of op-eration. The scores of eye-opening marvelsamassed on the showfloor at the TorontoCongress Centre were reinforced by two sig-nal events organized by PAC – The Packag-ing Association: One was PAC’s influentialLeadership Awards competition, recogniz-ing packaging innovations in design, tech-nical achievement, and environmentalsustainability, and the other was an intensive3-day conference program highlighting thelatest in packaging technology and trends.
Walmart Canada Corp. gained promi-nence at both events by sponsoring its ownBest of Show Award in this year’s competi-tion and by hosting its fifth annual Sustain-able Packaging Conference for one day ofthe conference proceedings. According toPAC President and CEO James Downham,Walmart’s Sustainable Packaging Confer-ence has emerged as one of the most-im-portant and well-attended forums for thepackaging community.
In a written welcome in Walmart’s con-ference brochure, Downham explains thatenvironmental sustainability continues tobe one of packaging’s top priorities, owingto the growing prominence of ExtendedProducer Responsibility or EPR. Brieflystated, EPR is an environmental policy thatextends a producer’s responsibility for aproduct to the post-consumer stage of theproduct’s life cycle, requiring producers todesign and implement stewardship pro-grams to achieve waste-reduction targets.
“EPR is the game changer that is shiftingrisk and opportunity across the packagingvalue chain,” Downham’s welcome states.“Cost to producers for taking on end-of-lifeproduct responsibilities are projected wellinto the billions. It is becoming clear thatnew thinking and leadership is necessary tohelp transition industry towards a futurewith Sustainably Financed Municipal SolidWaste. In response, PAC is assembling in-dustry leaders to proactively address thispressing issue.
“To ensure inclusiveness and transparency,PAC is including important stakeholdersfrom the recovery community and govern-ment. Our focus is on optimizing, mobilizingand mitigating risk of end-of-life solutionsfor packaging design, recovery (collectionand processing) and end markets.”
Sharing Walmart’s resources for sustainabilityRanked as the world’s largest corporation byannual revenues (a figure Walmart CanadaPresident and CEO David Cheeseworthcites as $400 billion), Walmart certainlypossesses the necessary resources and influ-ence to take on a global leadership role inenvironmental sustainability. Many of Wal-mart’s Toronto conference presentations,conducted by environmental heavy hittersboth from inside Walmart and from otherkey external organizations, filled a roomwith 850 seats, often leaving several dozenadditional listeners standing at the back.The report below summarizes just a few
very brief highlights of the extensive infor-mation they provided.
Cheesewright, whose former achieve-ments include successfully introducing Wal-mart’s supercentre format into Canada,presently oversees a growing chain of 325Canadian stores and over 85,000 associates,serving more than 1-million customers aday. In the conference brochure and a for-mal address, he emphasized his company’scommitment to sharing information on en-vironmental sustainability widely: “At Wal-mart, we strongly believe that sustainabilityshould not be a competitive advantage. Forthis reason, we remain committed to host-ing events like this one, where we create op-portunities for industry leaders to learnfrom each other and share information withthe goal of becoming sustainable,” he writes.His speech to conference attendees con-firms: “You should be able to get any infor-mation you want to hear about Walmart’ssustainability practices. If not, pick up thephone and tell me. We will share anythingwith anybody – competitor or not.”
Later, in a personal interview, I asked himhow PrintAction readers, who are primarilyemployed by or own relatively small printingcompanies, would fit into Walmart’s scenario.He replied that in business, because of Wal-mart’s huge scale, instead of trying to com-pete with Walmart, it often makes bettersense for smaller businesses to leverage thespecial strengths of being small – strengthssuch as service, flexibility, and uniqueness –in a way that big businesses can’t.
But Cheesewright says sustainability is adifferent matter: His company urges sup-pliers of every size to try to understand whatWalmart is trying to achieve and emulatetheir approach that, to be effective, sustain-ability must reach right through the struc-ture of the business from the executivesdown to the grassroots level. He insists onthe necessity of embedding sustainabilitythroughout an organization’s culture:
“It’s important to be open to feedback,not just about what’s working well, but alsowhat doesn’t work and what we could dobetter. Walmart operates on an open-doorconcept that allows any associate to raiseany issue of concern – either directly oranonymously, if they choose – without anynegative repercussions. Besides often pro-viding useful insights, it’s an amazinglygood way to keep in touch with what isgoing on.”
Additionally, Cheesewright’s speech out-lines Walmart’s My Sustainability Plan(MSP) program that gives Walmart associ-ates a vehicle to integrate environmentalpractices directly into their daily lives. Theplan asks them to identify something theyare passionate about in the categories ofPlanet, Health, or Life, then commit to aplan to make it part of their daily lives, tracktheir progress, and share their story to in-spire others. Cheeseworth reports that inthe 18 months this program has been run-ning, more than half of all Walmart associ-ates have developed MSPs. Examples oftheir initiatives include quitting smoking,recycling, carpooling, or switching to sus-tainable products.
My Walmart PlanVICTORIA GAITSKELL
16 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2011
Continued on page 28
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“We kept hearing that associates were really concerned about the environment,but most people didn’t have a clue what todo about it as individuals. The MSP pro-gram gives people a tangible way to getstarted and really do something,” he recounts in his speech, adding that his ownpersonal MSP is a regular morning bicycleride with colleagues.
Cheesewright recommends that printersand other businesses could implementsomething like the MSP program with theirstaff, as well as participate in ShareGreen.ca– a Website Walmart launched last year toprovide Canadian businesses with sustain-ability resources and enable them to sharecase studies and comments.
“Nothing is better than sharing ideas,”Cheeseworth affirms in his speech. “We canmake progress in sustainability by commit-ting time and passion, but the real answersare about collaboration and the ability tocollaborate in areas where we have not nor-mally been able to collaborate before.”
He asked the audience to go through theday seeking out people they had never metand looking at how to forge collaborativepartnerships with them going forward.“Don’t miss the fact that the contacts youmake will be as valuable as the content youhear,” he says.
Why green marketing needs to come cleanAnother conference presenter, Scott Mc-Dougall, is President and CEO of Terra-Choice and author of three studies called“The Sins of Greenwashing” that have beenattracting regular mass-media attention inNorth America and abroad since 2007.
His company’s Website defines ‘green-washing’ as: “the act of misleading con-sumers regarding the environmentalpractices of a company or the environmen-tal benefits of a product or service.” It sub-divides this practice into seven categories or“Sins” according to the type of misrepre-sentation being committed.
For instance, The Sin of No Proof entails“an environmental claim that cannot besubstantiated by easily accessible support-ing information or by a reliable third-partycertification.” Common examples are facialor toilet tissues that claim to contain vari-ous percentages of post-consumer recycledmaterials without providing any support-ing evidence.
The Sin of Vagueness entails “a claim thatis so poorly defined or broad that its realmeaning is likely to be misunderstood bythe consumer.” For example, the overusedterm ‘all-natural’ could well describe ingre-dients such as arsenic, uranium, mercury,and formaldehyde, since all are naturallyoccurring – and toxic – substances. Toavoid sins of vagueness, McDougall suggestthat marketers should replace such inex-plicit terms as “green” , “environmentallyfriendly”, or “eco-friendly,” with more precise explanations of what they mean; forexample, “30 percent recycled content”.
Perhaps short of The Sin of Fibbing, themost blatant greenwashing transgression isThe Sin of Worshiping False Labels: “aproduct that, through either words or images, gives the impression of third-partyendorsement where no such endorsementexists.” As evidence of the false-label phe-nomenon, McDougall shows the audience
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a fictitious “Certified EnvironmentallyConscious” seal of approval he bought on-line for $15! As an antidote to fake labels,his study includes a list of 24 certificationstandards or programs that are recognizedas legitimate. He points out that green ad-vertising has more than tripled in the lastthree years, and although some players inthe marketplace are manipulating the op-portunity adversely with such devices asfalse labels, he offers the encouragement: “Ifyou get it right, then your marketing will bevery, very effective.”
McDougall admits that his studies haveattracted media attention partly because ofthe deliberate salaciousness of their titles.But additionally, he notes that so far thethird study, investigating 5,296 productsmaking green claims in the United Statesand Canada, and released in the last quar-ter of 2010, has attracted 244-million mediaimpressions. He believes this astronomicalpublicity count proves that his latest studyhas hit a nerve because today’s world iswatching green claims closely.
He elaborates on the implications of thissurveillance for businesses: “If you make in-vestments in sustainable packaging, yourun a risk of scrutiny. And if you hit thatnerve the wrong way, all that work andgood intentions run the risk of backfiring.So you need to pay attention to the issue ofgreenwashing and take a genuine sustain-ability proposition to market. And if youdo, why would you not want to receive thislevel of scrutiny?”
McDougall reports that 95 percent of theproducts he studied most recently werefound to be committing one of the SevenSins. “But to consumers faced with this re-ality, we still say keep buying the products,because you need to send the signal withyour dollars that you want more greenproducts in the marketplace. There is evi-dence that the more we continue to de-mand green products while simultaneouslydemanding more transparency, companiesare responding constructively. So keep buy-ing green products and, when you’re of-fered the choice between one that’s moretransparent and informative versus onethat’s not, choose the ones that are moretransparent.”
Based on this rationale, McDougall urgesgreen marketers to confess and repent theirsustainability sins: “If you admit your lim-itations and reveal your products and your-self as on a journey, your customers arewilling to join you on that journey. You cansay things like: ‘We’re not sustainable, butwe think we know what it looks like. Lookat this step we’ve taken.’
“Being sustainable starts with the will-ingness to reveal the detail and imperfec-tions in your claim. We don’t trust peopleor products who purport to be perfect – es-pecially not in as complicated a claim as en-vironmental sustainability.”
McDougall concedes that his company’sslant on sustainability differs from Wal-mart’s: “David Cheesewright says sustain-ability should not be a competitive edge, andthat Walmart wants to share sustainabilityintelligence with everybody who’s interested.But the fact is that not everyone takes ad-vantage of these kinds of opportunities theright way. We want you to use sustainabilityto win in the marketplace and take market-share away from those who don’t care.”
Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideaswith readers at [email protected]
