We have a longstanding agreement with Western Digital and engineering and technology firm BOSCH based on the supply, branding and packaging of high performance SD and microSD cards for use in BOSCH’s premium internet connected cameras. These cameras are in use in many countries around the world. We source the cards from Western Digital, assemble and package them, and send them to a BOSCH partner organisation in the Netherlands, where they are dispatched according to customer order requirements. Some of these cards are delivered to customers in Italy.
Italy has recently introduced legislation which makes environmental labelling mandatory on all new packaging from January 2023. Producers are required to say what materials are used in packaging via a predefined coding system. This covers many types of materials, including plastics. Packaging designed for consumers also needs to contain instructions about its disposal.
While we don’t ship direct to Italy under this contract, some of the goods we ship do end up there. So we decided to adopt the new packaging requirements. We did this for a couple of reasons.
It is obviously good customer service for us to ensure that BOSCH doesn’t have to undertake a separate packaging exercise just for product it is sending to Italy. Doing so would mean they incur additional costs, which we want to help them avoid. In addition, the legislation’s focus on environmental labelling chimes with some of our own ongoing work relating to our use of sustainable materials. We were already thinking about reducing our use of plastics, and we took the opportunity to think much more expansively about the type of packaging we use for BOSCH.
As a result of this work, we have considerably changed how we fulfil the packaging part of our BOSCH contract to eliminate the use of plastic. Our usual way of working was to use plastic shrink-wrap for packs of 10 and 20 BOSCH cards, and to box these using polystyrene chips and peanut packaging to fill air-gaps in boxes. We have radically changed this, to remove all plastic components and will use paper or card to fill air-gaps in boxes.
We have not limited this initiative to our BOSCH contract. We are using this opportunity to undertake a full review of packaging across the business, including re-evaluating our packaging suppliers. We want to ensure that all our box and printing partners use as much FSC certified product as possible.
None of this is especially innovative for us. Our Quality Management System commitments mean we undertake regular reviews of systems and processes, and these reviews include an element of scrutiny of materials and suppliers to ensure we meet environmental obligations. When working with a customer gives us an opportunity to meet their needs and at the same time look at our business more widely, we will take it. As a company conscious of our responsibilities to the environment and to best practice more widely, this is the logical, sensible and pragmatic approach to take.
