As part of our sustainability goals, we are updating our cardboard cases for all of our Ready-to-Drink products starting this month. You will start seeing the new brown cases in your orders right away and we expect a full transition in our inventory by mid-2020. We are making this move to reduce our environmental footprint.
This change was a clear next step following the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that we completed in 2019 (Soylent LCA) where a significant part of our sustainability footprint was shown to be driven by our cardboard cases. To make this transition successful we have partnered with Green Bay Packaging, one of the largest privately-owned, corrugated packaging companies in the US. Green Bay Packaging manages more than 250,000 acres of sustainably managed forest lands and their Green Bay Wisconsin mill, where they began, 30 years ago, to work towards achieving a circular fiber economy by increasing recyclable fiber material into their products.
An industry leader, Green Bay Packaging, achieved 100% recycled content in 1991 and their mill is one of the first containerboard mills in the nation to invest in the circular efficiency of water recycling by investing in innovative water recycling equipment for their mill.
The Sustainable Forestry Initiative ®
With the move to the new packaging, you will also notice a new logo on our cases, the Sustainable Forest Initiative® Certified Sourcing label. This SFI® certification logo means that the fiber in a product is responsibly sourced and third-party certified to specific fiber sourcing standards, including recycled content or first use fiber from certified forests.
In Soylent’s case, the fiber used to make our cases is responsibly sourced with 80% recycled content, exceeding the industry average of 47%.
And now the numbers:
Based on the redesign of our cardboard cases to 80% recycled content, we will see the following reduction to the sustainability footprint of our cases:
- Save an estimated 4390 trees from harvest, avoiding a forest of 133 trees from being cut down
- 50% reduction in greenhouse gases, equivalent to 217 fewer cars on the road per year
- 31% less energy usage in making our boxes
- An estimated 4500 pounds reduction on printing ink usage
Impact of new Soylent Drink Case to common sustainability measures
We have more work to do to address the findings of the LCA on both our packaging and our products so stay tuned for more updates from us on that front.
