Giant retailer Wal-Mart is endeavoring to uphold a new retailing standard that promotes sustainability in product packaging. With the goal of reducing packaging by 5% across its supply change by the year 2013, Wal-Mart is factoring scorecard results from 60,000 suppliers into its purchasing decisions starting in early 2008.

The scorecard is a tool that allows suppliers to evaluate their packaging relative to other suppliers based on specific metrics. These metrics evolved from the “7 Rs of Packaging: remove, reduce, reuse, recycle, renew, revenue, and read,” and are weighted as follows:

• 15% for greenhouse gases/carbon dioxide per ton of production
• 15% for material value — how much raw material is used to create the package
• 15% for product/package ratio — how small a package is used for the product
• 15% for cube utilization — ratio of packaging to the product
• 10% for transportation impacts
• 10% for recycled content in the package
• 10% for recovery value of the packaging material
• 5% for renewable energy used to produce the package
• 5% for packaging innovation.

Suppliers will use these criteria to determine how their packaging innovations, environmental standards, energy efficiencies, and use of materials match up against those of their peers. PSC has made and will continue to make the modifications and enhancements necessary to help our customers achieve a high rating on the scorecard.