Gauging Your Greenness: The EcoGauge App Lets Shippers Calculate Environmental Impact of Damaged Products

For shippers, sizing up the financial hit from damaged products is standard operating procedure. But the impact from damages extends well-beyond the bottom line. Aside from taking a toll on profits, damages have an immense effect on our environment, and shippers should take notice.

In fact, each damaged product, on average, adds 18.32 kg of carbon dioxide gas emissions into the atmosphere. Couple that with the fact that today’s landscape is shifting, where the environment, and what we’re collectively doing as organizations to protect it, is taking center stage.

“A new era of corporate sustainability is here, and it’s having a great effect on businesses,” said Daché Davidson, VP of Marketing at Pregis, a leading manufacturer and provider of innovative packaging and protective products. “And these businesses need to know how the decisions they make impact the world around them. Today’s customers are interested in doing business with those that invest in the environment and make conscious decisions that support protecting it,” she said.

This is why Pregis created the first-ever tool of its kind for environmentally conscious shippers: the EcoGauge calculator, an app that uses a shipper’s unique data to accurately measure the environmental impact of their damaged products.  

Inspiring Action with Insights

The EcoGauge app helps shippers understand and quantify the environmental impact of products damaged during transit. The app, available for use on desktop and mobile devices, analyzes data provided by the shipper, including the quantity of annual packages shipped, damage rate and average product weight. It then calculates the anticipated resources needed to dispose of damaged products and deliver replacements. 

“The numbers don’t lie,” Davidson said. “Armed with data, shippers can take action to reduce their environmental impact – including reducing waste and adequately protecting products with better protective packaging materials,” she said. “Ensuring each product ordered online is delivered to a customer only once – instead of multiple times due to damages – is one of the best ways shippers can show a real commitment to sustainability.”

An Inclusive Way of Assessing Impact

EcoGauge offers a comprehensive look at environmental impacts, including the usage of trees, gasoline, electricity and natural gas. It also measures carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions, habitat loss, solid waste destined for landfills and the impact on water quality. In most cases, the data are eye-opening.

To put things in perspective, according to a new white paper on eCommerce damages and sustainability, the average damaged product uses the following resources and has the following effects on the environment:

• 453.5 grams of methane gas emissions
• 01 trees
• 1.2 square meters of natural habitat lost
• 8 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity
• 1,697 British thermal units (BTUs) of heat produced
• 26.4 liters of fuel
• 4.5 kg of solid waste in landfills
• 1.8 kg of carbon dioxide gas emissions

For high-volume shippers with elevated damage rates, those numbers can quickly add up, demonstrating that inadequately protected parcels can easily offset whatever sustainability initiatives shippers have in place. 

“The numbers don’t lie. Armed with data, shippers can take action to reduce their environmental impact – including reducing waste and adequately protecting products with proper protective packaging materials.”

Using Data for Better Decisions

Crunching the numbers through EcoGauge can inspire corrective action and better packaging decisions. Through the use of the right protective packaging materials alone, shippers can greatly reduce their damage rate. And being able to measure the result of damaged goods beyond dollars – to an even more scarce resource, Planet Earth – is an eye-opening experience.

Damages are often preventable, so when shippers make better decisions, they make their business more efficient, and win over the loyalty and admiration of their customers …and even competitors. Because, after all, we all share this planet we call home.