The global sustainable packaging market is valued at approximately 244 billion dollars as of this year. There’s significant opportunity to promote your brand and your company as a steward of the environment and improve your brands perception as an environmentally responsible company. In order to innovate and increasingly find ways to reduce your carbon footprint it’s important to foster and promote a culture of sustainability. However, it can be difficult to measure this. There are no shortage of ways and opinions on how to measure sustainability within a company. There are countless criteria and opinions and often they are in conflict with one another. Without agreed upon methodologies to measure it can be difficult to outline a strategy to promote a culture of sustainability. This is partly due to the fact that culture isn’t a tangible concept and this makes it difficult to quantify. However, there are a number of practices a company can promote that are clear and simple to implement. Below are three well defined ways to create a sustainability culture which will better align with any sustainable packaging practices.
By involving company employees in helping to define what sustainability is you will promote a feeling of ownership over the concept. Allowing employees to have input will increase their buy-in. Starting a dialogue and allowing conversation will really help to define what sustainability means for you company. But do not forget to eventually take the conversations to the next level and define company wide practices that reflect all the diversity of the opinions and dialogue.
It can be quite challenging to promote a concept company wide. Employees are often compartmentalized into their respective departments. Human resources may have little interactions with an operations employee in the packaging department for example. It can be especially challenging to promote an idea if your company has more of a vertical structure versus a horizontal structure. By hiring generalists who permeate through departments it can be easier to equip them to promote a culture of sustainability rather than asking managers and executive level employees to push this concept.
Companies always have much to learn and can be quite stubborn when it comes to change. But by looking to others and being open to learning how other companies have developed their sustainability practices it’s possible to bring in and implement fresh ideas. For example employees can be encouraged to attend networking events or conferences.
Building a company which utilize sustainable packaging is great but without a company wide culture of sustainability your brand will fall short of it’s potential.
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