Striving to be a leader across all aspects of sustainability, Amcor has set aggressive environmental targets in its Australasian operations and is taking a leadership role in working with its customers to assist them in adopting sustainable packaging products.
Over the last four years Amcor has made significant investments in life cycle assessment (LCA) tools and technology.
The company has adopted the new Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool (PIQET) to strengthen its internal capabilities, by allowing a broader deployment throughout the company and enabling quicker packaging life cycle assessments.
Amcor is the first packaging company to be using PIQET to provide customers with informed data on the impact of its packaging products, to benchmark its products and processes and develop strategies to reduce the environmental impact of packaging.
PIQET is provided by the Sustainable Packaging Alliance (SPA) for packaging designers and manufacturers to identify review and reduce the environmental impact of packaging.
“PIQET provides us with a rapid, scientifically based tool for assessing the impact of packaging designs and process improvements. PIQET allows us to take a value chain approach to sustainable design, a capability which was previously difficult and required significant resource investment in life cycle assessment studies,” said Amcor’s group manager sustainability services, Dr Juanita Day.
“It is easily used by all business units including sales and marketing, product designers, and technical product development professionals. The environmental impact of a packaging system over its full life cycle is assessed quickly.
“Reports include graphics that aid communication and understanding of environmental impact across a number of categories including climate change, solid waste, water, and energy. Importantly, PIQET allows us to explore variations in packaging design and supply chains to minimise the effect it has on the key criteria.
“PIQET allows environmental information to be presented to our customers alongside functional, financial and marketing factors – something that could not be done easily before,” she said.
PIQET is based on internationally accepted life cycle assessment methods allowing Amcor and its customers to understand what environmental impacts are occurring and where in the supply chain they are dominant.
PIQET is available by subscription and has already been used by a number of leading food and beverage companies, many who were involved in its development.
These include:
- Nestlé Australia,
- Cadbury Schweppes,
- Lion Nathan,
- MasterFoods Australia, and
- Simplot Australia.
Sustainability Victoria and the Commonwealth Department’s of Environment and Water Resources and, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts provided funding for the development of PIQET.