• Crowded house: strong turnout at the APC forum in Sydney. (Image: Shaun Scallan, Planet Ark).
    Crowded house: strong turnout at the APC forum in Sydney. (Image: Shaun Scallan, Planet Ark).
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The APC hosted a series of well-attended packaging assessment forums in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne during May.

The workshops showcased a range of resources and tools which assist APC signatories to meet their obligations as APC signatories and align with their business goals to become leaders in packaging sustainability.

These included APC Case Studies, which explore the Business Case for Packaging Sustainability by showcasing successful projects from eleven signatory companies, and the Packaging Assessment Case Studies of six organisations and their approaches to assessing packaging to drive more sustainable packaging solutions.

In the life cycle assessment (LCA) armoury, PIQET is a web-based business tool used to optimise packaging system design from an environmental perspective in all stages of the product development process. Click here for more.

The Packaging Recyclability Evaluation Portal (PREP) is a joint program originally scoped and commissioned by the Australian Packaging Covenant, and jointly developed, managed and owned by Planet Ark and GreenChip. It is designed to assist brand owners, packaging designers, manufacturers and other packaging supply chain stakeholders to determine whether specific packaging formats are recyclable in Australia, and how various combinations of materials are likely to perform throughout the recovery and recycling process. Find out more here.

Planet Ark will be hosting a 45-minute webinar on PREP on 18 June at 10 am, you can register here.

Gabi Envision is an easy-to-use interface that lets organisations harness all the power of LCAs immediately, without LCA expertise. The tool allows signatories to embed sustainability early in the design process, and compare designs, materials and lifecycle scenarios to increase efficiency and reduce risks while creating new packaging. For more, visit here.

GRIPS Australia is a tool specifically designed for signatories to the Australian Packaging Covenant. It works by linking a company’s reporting obligations to your existing protocols for packaging design, recycling and product stewardship of packaging. It can produce complete packaging compliance reports with a full audit trail for a company’s packaging as required. For more, visit here.

Finally, the APC is currently exploring interest in Design for Recovery and Recycling Workshops. Signatories will have the opportunity to visit a Material Recovery Facility and hear from industry experts Anne Prince and Lee Smith about ways in which packaging design can account for the recovery and recycling system, and have a better chance of being recycled.

For more information on any of these workshops, email the APC.

Food & Drink Business

Entries are now open for the annual Melbourne Royal Australian Food Awards. Open to commercial food producers of all sizes, it is one of the largest programs of its kind. 

Victorian brewery, Bodriggy Brewing Co, is the first brewery in the state to achieve carbon-neutral certification and only the second in Australia to do so. The independent Abbotsford-based brewery achieved certification under the federal government’s Climate Active program.

According to Rabobank data, Australian consumers are facing higher chocolate prices heading into Easter, with retail chocolate prices up 8.8 per cent on the previous year as global cocoa prices soar.