Once we hear about responsible sourcing in the context of sustainable packaging, it’s usually an advocacy for using both renewable assets from effectively-managed sources, or non-renewable sources from the recycling stream instead of virgin sources. This broad guidance certainly covers the most important considerations of accountable sourcing, however an upcoming U.S. Securities and Trade Fee vote led me to consider that there are greater dimensions for us to think about.
The vote applies to a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that would require corporations to disclose their usage of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the surrounding area. There are four basic minerals of concern: gold, wolframite (supply of tungsten), columbite-tantalie (source of the component tantalum), and cassiterite, which is a very powerful source of tin. Most of the scrutiny around these minerals happens with makers of electronics, and at first look there’s not much of a connection to packaging. My thinking was “definitely no gold in packaging, can’t think about there’s any tungsten, no clue what tantalum is, and tin might only show up in small amounts in tin cans (which are made virtually completely from steel, in case you didn’t know).” But, life cycle stock information always reveals a bunch of materials that one wouldn’t usually affiliate with the major packaging materials, and positive sufficient, there’s a measurable amount of tin used to make most kinds of packaging.
Natural compounds containing tin can be utilized as catalysts, stabilizers, or polymerization aids to make plastics. Tin is an alloying ingredient in aluminum. Glass containers have a coating of a tin-bearing compound. And sure, tin can jewelry box cans are certainly coated with tin. On a kilogram-by-kilogram basis, it’s really glass containers that use essentially the most tin. Second place? Recycled folding boxboard. Of all the materials, I haven’t any clue how tin elements into making recycled folding boxboard – if you understand, fill me in, please.
Even so, the quantity of tin used is relatively tiny. Utilizing the example of glass containers, a rough calculation tells me that about 52 kilograms of tin have been utilized in all of the container glass produced in 2010 – that’s 52 kilograms of tin to make 8.5 billion kilograms of container glass. 52 kilograms of tin? That’s not a lot. To place that in perspective, Wikipedia tells us that just about 300 million kilograms of tin had been produced in 2006.
Wikipedia additionally tells us that someplace around 80-90% of the world’s tin is produced in China and Indonesia. So what are the probabilities that the tin used in packaging comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the place it’s alleged that the sale of minerals goes to funding the battle there? Most likely fairly low. Nonetheless, it seems fairly plausible that someplace in someone’s packaging provide chain, there’s at the least a miniscule incidence of battle tin. Addressing our utilization of tin in packaging in all probability ought to not be excessive on our checklist of the way to make packaging more sustainable, but it’s something to bear in mind.
My takeaway is this: there’s an absolute plethora of supplies that go into making packaging. If we would like packaging to be actually sustainable, we must examine each enter. We can’t overgeneralize packaging and improve our usage of solely the most important raw supplies. Things like tin, nevertheless small our usage is, can’t be ignored, especially when lives may hinge on it.