Happy Earth Day!
The Spearhead Group’s core values include a focus on sustainability which we share with our partners and clients on a global scale. One way to bring awareness to sustainability is Earth Month, which celebrates 51 years this April. Earth Month is specifically focused on “a month of activities, bringing about awareness and sharing of knowledge about environmental and social-economic issues in any given area or region by its intrinsic needs. A month of such activities broadens a time period with the hope that such activities will continue throughout the year.”
Earth Month is another great opportunity to reflect on what The Spearhead Group is doing to share knowledge and encourage activities to continuously design with sustainability in mind. Not only do we believe that sustainability is important for our packaging designs, but the culture at Spearhead encourages everyone to open their hearts and minds to opportunities to save Earth’s natural resources including local river clean-ups. Sustainability can be defined and measured in a variety of ways, but we always partner with clients to develop and continue to engineer packaging with sustainability in mind; specifically minimizing the total amount of packaging, using recycled materials, and ensuring all post-consumer packaging is recyclable or reusable. We continue to search the globe for partners that innovate with recycled materials and promote innovation for secondary usage. A few interesting examples of innovative sustainable materials include: mango by-product/coffee/bacteria to make vegan leather, biodegradable and ‘turtle edible’ wheat and barley packaging by E6PR , and seed paper that is made with post-consumer waste that is biodegradable and grows plants. In the beauty and personal care industry, LOLI Beauty, owned by Tory Burch Fellow Tina Hedges, is launching a set of three organic beauty products packed in mushroom and upcycled packaging – the first 100%, zero-waste beauty set.
“What the earth needs from all of us – particularly those of us who are responsible for packaging and procurement decisions – is the intent and determination to make sustainable choices in every single decision we face,” said Heather Fritzsche, Co-Founder & CEO of The Spearhead Group. “Some of these decisions are difficult to make, come with some risk, or with higher costs (although most come with reduced costs), but as corporate procurement decision makers, we have a higher level of accountability and impact than each of us have individually as citizens. As corporations we need to continually upgrade and expand our sustainable choices and programs.”
We would like to challenge you to think about how you or your company can create a sustainable-forward thinking culture. Have you realized your potential to bring awareness and knowledge to your community about environmental and social-economic issue to create yearlong efforts?
If your company wants to take the first step, please reach out to discuss how you can look at your packaging from a sustainability perspective and minimize your impact on the Earth. Please reach out to Pamela Wyatt Ashcraft.