Decarbonising the supply chain

Carbon Compensation as a Packaging Service?

Botta Packaging, Italy, are taking their sustainability services one step further. In addition to offering top quality sustainable packaging options they are now going to ensure their customers can truly minimise their environmental impact by offering carbon-offsetting as a service.

Botta are known for helping their customers achieve their sustainability goals by providing innovative sustainable packaging solutions. Despite this, Botta recognise there was more they could do. Their challenge was that most of their packaging was already low impact. Corrugated cardboard boxes and paper-based packaging come from sustainable sources. They can be recycled numerous times and even be made out of recycled materials, making them a valuable part of the circular economy. So where else could Botta help customers make impact reductions?

Decarbonising the packaging supply chain

When the UK played host to COP26 in October last year, over 40 governments signed up to ‘the Glasgow Breakthroughs’ – a series of commitments to speed up the development of clean technologies to help achieve key climate targets by 2030.

These commitments made decarbonising industry everyone’s business – from the smallest supply chain company to the largest contractor. A combination of legal directives and customer pressure are quickly moving sustainability up the procurement agenda and every supplier is expected to have a sustainability roadmap. This lays out not only what the company itself is doing to improve its environmental performance, but also how that plays a part in helping customers achieve their sustainability goals.

At the heart of each roadmap lies a commitment to identifying and reducing CO2 emissions, including emissions resulting from the organisation’s own operations, as well as its upstream and downstream activities. This means companies are now interdependent across supply chains when it comes to achieving the industry’s Net Zero goals.

Reducing carbon emissions to Net Zero is a real challenge for the packaging industry, not least because of its diverse product mix (each with different carbon intensities and spread across different geographies). Many companies are already exploring the ‘quick wins’ – from switching away from single use plastics to making greater use of recycled and lower carbon materials – but while existing solutions will take companies some way along the road, delivering reductions at the scale required to drive emissions to zero means more innovative Cleantech solutions are required. (Extracts from a post by Linda Smith of Cleantech)

Courtesy BetaDen North Cleantech / Linda Smith