Sustainability goes beyond just less packaging material
Sustainable packaging is the trend. The quality requirements are getting stricter and the call for a lower CO2 footprint is getting louder. What strikes me is that the focus is mainly on saving packaging materials. While there is even more to gain by choosing returnable packaging. In this blog I explain how I see that.
Returnable packaging as a sustainable solution
With sustainability, people in logistics often think about savings in the amount of packaging material, focusing mainly on the material, weight and size of the packaging. I always challenge my clients to look a little further and think about reusing the packaging. In my experience, returnable packaging can be profitable on several fronts. Consider the environment, delivery performance, product lifecycle and customer relations.
Better performance
Customers are placing increasingly stringent demands on the quality of the products they order. One of the prerequisites is that your product arrives at its destination in one piece and on time. Clean, without scratches, working properly. Rejection or DOA (Defect on Arrival) is unacceptable. It causes delays for your customer, who (rightly!) does not want them. With returnable packaging you reduce this risk and you can improve your performance. For example, a flight case is much sturdier and better constructed than one-way packaging. After all, it is made to be shipped multiple times and can handle a blow or impact considerably better.
Better for the environment
Especially if you regularly ship products to your customer, you can significantly reduce yourcarbon footprint with returnable packaging. Purchasing a cardboard box or wooden crate over and over again is less sustainable than using returnable packaging. The waste stream and production costs of one-way packaging have a significant impact on yourcarbon footprint. In addition, sustainable returnable packaging helps reduce the risk of DOA. That way, you can avoid unnecessary transport movements to replace a broken product.
Preventing hidden costs
Rejection or DOA costs handsomely. It causes annoyance and hassle for the customer, but also for you. If you ship 10 products and 1 of them arrives defective, you have to set up a whole process for this one product to solve this problem. The customer has to return the product and wait for a replacement, you have to repair this product or take it out of circulation and send a new product to the customer. The inside sales department, the business office, production, logistics and planning, they all have to get to work to take care of this. How efficient is that? With solid return packaging, you reduce the risk of DOA and its associated costs. This can save you a lot of cost (and hassle).
More sales
With the right packaging, you also invest in customer satisfaction. A mishap along the way can always happen, but after a few misses, you already have to fight hard to restore trust and maintain cooperation. Don’t forget that DOA is customer annoyance number one. If the delivery performance is terrible, you can forget about new orders. With the right packaging, however, you can make a good impression on your customer. And I am convinced that this can only benefit your sales.
Making choices for the longer term
In practice, we see more and more buyers looking for sustainable packaging solutions. However, they do not immediately think of returnable packaging. They are often surprised when we provide insight into what is possible and what long-term savings they can achieve with it. For one of our customers, for example, we have set up a global pool for flight cases. We keep the flightcases in stock here and deliver them exactly on time, worldwide. The flightcases then come back to us, we clean them and make repairs where necessary to recondition them. In this way, we ensure an optimal lifespan for the return packaging and completely relieve our customer. This customer’s delivery performance has never been higher!
Is returnable packaging cost-effective for my product?
Of course, I would not argue that returnable packaging is necessarily the most sustainable packaging solution. Choosing the right packaging is more complex than that. In this white paper, you’ll read how to choose the best packaging for your product. But I do advocate looking not only at the purchase price of packaging, but also at the long-term costs and returns. Ultimately, your company will be judged on delivery performance. Therefore, consider reusable packaging.
Are you also looking for ways to become more sustainable?
Then let’s have a conversation together. We bet we’ll soon arrive at concrete actions that will not only reduce your impact on the environment, but also lower your costs and risks. Leave your question in the contact form below or call or email us directly.