Giraffe Innovation ran a workshop in central London on Tuesday 17 June 08 aimed at helping businesses to understand and improve the carbon footprint of their packaging. Giraffe is one of the organisations behind the WEEE Man and therefore an inspiration for the Reee Chair which Pli has developed with Sprout Design and others. Click the image for more information on this event…

Two of us attended the workshop and we learned a lot about business attitudes to packaging. We have been trying to develop packaging designs that are courier-proof, easily recycled and made from sustainable materials. The information we gained from Giraffe has sent us back to the drawing board in a couple of places but generally speaking it has bolstered our confidence to continue on the route we have chosen.

The workshop was supported by the London Manufacturing Advisory Service and I hope they do more of this sort of thing. There were some very large companies in the audience, of a big enough scale to make a noticeable difference to the carbon footprint of packaging in the UK supply network.

And us: in fact there was a good mix of large and small businesses so Pli didn’t look out of place. Our problems are broadly the same, although the economy of scale works in favour of the larger companies. The handy advice we have taken away from Giraffe’s workshop is that small modifications add up to big savings, that less packaging is definitely more money for us — it isn’t just carbon we can save — and that nobody has all the answers. It’s up to us to take our packaging design in hand and we should not rely on accepted practice and conventional suppliers to reduce our carbon or cash overheads.