Increasingly, customers demand packaging to be sustainable, innovative, fit for purposes, as well as cost effective. SKG works closely with customers to achieve more sustainable solutions. For example, delivering packaging which uses less material or lighter material and transit packaging which makes it possible to reduce or even eliminate primary packaging. The creative design team explores what is possible in the most open minded way.

Working innovatively together with customers on sustainability has two main aspects. Firstly, SKG gives customers a credible guarantee that the packaging it supplies is produced in the most sustainable way, using materials from sustainable sources and utilising every possible design skill.

But looking at the packaging alone is not enough as the direct CO2 impact of secondary packaging is only around 4% in a typical customer’s supply chain. However the packaging related indirect impact (damage/destruction of the packed product, logistics, waste, disposal, etc) is much more significant for the sustainability of a customer’s supply chain. Therefore the second aspect on which we focus is the design and development of packaging which minimises a customer’s total sustainability impact per unit of delivered product.

For Smurfit Kappa that means that for many customers we carry out evaluations with the help of Smurfit Kappa Innotools (Pack Expert, Paper-to-Box, Innobook), seeking to optimise the direct and indirect impact of our packaging on sustainability through the entire supply chain. For example, by changing the pallet structure of primary products it is possible to reduce the indirect CO2 emissions of transportation.