How FSC Certified Suppliers Can Help You Hit Your Sustainability Goals
Using sustainable packaging is better for the environment and helps impress sustainability minded customers. Working with FSC certified suppliers makes it easy.
Executive Summary
- Sustainability has gone mainstream, with many brands setting ambitious sustainability goals for themselves — often timed to coincide with the UN’s 2030 goals.
- The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certifies suppliers as using sustainably sourced wood products like paper.
- Partnering with an FSC certified supplier like Pregis allows brands to easily and transparently tie sustainability into their packaging.
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Sustainability has gone mainstream. Once a buzzword for the granola and drum circle crowd, it’s now a driving force for consumer behavior. As of March 2021, for example, 34% of UK consumers reported they had chosen brands that have environmentally sustainable practices or values. An even larger 61% limited their use of single-use plastics. Consumers care, and that means brands need to care, too.
And brands have taken up the call, many setting ambitious sustainability goals for themselves — often timed to coincide with the UN’s 2030 goals. These goals are encouraging to anyone who believes in building a more sustainable world, but they’re also undoubtedly going to be a challenge. Brands big and small will need to reverse decades of momentum and find new, better, more sustainable ways of doing things that meet their green goals and also make it easy for consumers to recognize and buy sustainable products without driving up costs or production difficulties.
Certifiable Sustainability
Enter market-based sustainability certification programs. These programs, often working as multi-stakeholder non-profit organizations, help improve global sustainability by offering guidelines and certifications for companies working towards a greener future. For brands looking to adopt more responsible and respectful business practices, these organizations offer a number of benefits:
- Setting sustainability guidelines: The organizations help build a playbook of best practices and requirements to help guide brands towards sustainability.
- Validating sustainable practices: Once companies are in compliance with best practices, these organizations can verify and validate their efforts.
- Connecting sustainable supply chains: These organizations can help partners with sourcing more sustainable raw materials and supplies.
- Communicating sustainability to consumers: Once a brand is validated, these organizations provide assistance with advertising sustainability to end users.
In short, sustainability certification programs help brands hit their sustainability goals and prove they’ve done so to customers.
Better Packing With FSC Certified Suppliers
This is where the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, comes in. Established in 1993, the FSC is one of the oldest, most well-established sustainability organizations in the world, focusing on responsible forest management and sustainable forestry products. As part of that mission, the organization certifies suppliers that meet requirements. These certifications then help buyers understand the sustainability efforts being done upstream and how they relate to their sustainability goals.
The FSC offers several labels and certifications, ranging from forest management to recycled content. The one Pregis is proud to bear is an FSC Chain-of-Custody, FSC Recycled certification for our Easypack® line of paper packaging products. That might seem like a mouthful, but it really means two main things:
- There is a clear chain of custody for all wood-based products used by Pregis, meaning every piece of wood-based material can be traced back along the full manufacturing journey to an FSC certified forest, and that the material only passes through FSC certified processors and manufacturers.
- Pregis’s Easypack® paper is made out of 100% recycled paper content, with most of that being post-consumer recycled paper.
This is important for our customers because it means they can use our sustainability wins to get closer to their own sustainability goals. Using Easypack® FSC Recycled-certified paper for your packing needs is a great way to make a big difference with a relatively minor change in operations.
Small changes to packaging and fulfillment strategies can create major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, equating to lower carbon taxes for companies.
Why Recycled Content Matters
Why is it such a big deal? Post-consumer recycled paper gets us closer to achieving a circular economy and cuts down on waste and emissions. It helps to preserve our forests, so that future generations can enjoy the same green spaces and clean air that we do. Post-consumer paper also takes significantly less energy to produce than new paper, cutting down on CO2 emissions. And because paper can be recycled up to seven times, these benefits can be reaped again and again and again.
In short, switching your packaging to an FSC certified supplier like Pregis makes it easier to hit your own sustainability goals by piggy-backing off of the work that Pregis has already done. It’s better for the environment, it protects your packages, and it helps consumers recognize the hard work you’re doing to meet your sustainability goals.
To learn more about Pregis’ sustainability initiatives and products, contact us today.
