Sustainable packaging in the mail order business: Holistic conversion enables ecological shipping

For re-natur, a provider of natural roof and garden design, sustainability has always been an integral part of the company concept. The company from Ruhwinkel in Schleswig-Holstein has been offering natural green roofs, garden ponds and pools as well as biological plant protection, which includes beneficial living insects such as bumblebees or aphid lions, for almost 50 years. A trend that has taken hold at re-natur in recent years is increased sales via online trading. Both companies and private customers increasingly appreciate this purchase option. This automatically increases the amount of packaging material required - a development that runs counter to re-natur's climate protection efforts. To counteract this, the company asked ratioform, a provider of packaging solutions, for advice and the development of a holistic packaging concept. ratioform has already gained very good experience in a wide range of industries with its established, sustainable terra product line and was therefore a household name at re-natur. ratioform terra includes ecological and efficient packaging solutions as well as professional advice for sustainable packaging and was thus perfectly suited to review the previous shipping solutions.

The analysis of sustainability criteria

Five central characteristics are examined for terra products: Does the product consist mainly of renewable raw materials? Is it compostable? Can it be recycled? Is it made from recycled material? Is it CO2-neutral? With this knowledge, coupled with the know-how on mechanical packaging processes, ratioform has ideal prerequisites as a consulting company. This was followed by a comprehensive analysis of the previous processes and packaging materials used.

Jörg Baumhauer, managing director of re-natur GmbH, emphasises: "The majority of our customers come from the landscaping and horticulture sector and attach importance to climate protection goals." He wants to live up to this claim and do his part. Around 11,000 parcels are sent throughout Europe every month. Previously, re-natur used cardboard boxes in a wide variety of sizes, and countless metres of adhesive tape were consumed. ratioform's first step was to analyse not only the cardboard boxes, but also the filling material, recyclability and CO2 impact.

The optimisation in detail

In several steps ratioform helped to change the dispatch: The range of cardboard boxes was reduced, new boxes of the terra line were used. The new cardboard boxes made of grass paper and bearing the re-natur logo are CO2-neutral and are filled with recycled paper. For this purpose, the PadPak Junior machine folds and creases recyclable FSC paper in such a way that it reliably secures the goods. Instead of plastic adhesive tape, which previously additionally secured the boxes, wet adhesive tape made of paper is now used.
Shipping the live bumblebee colonies was a special challenge. The animals need a constant temperature to survive the transport undamaged. Whereas they were previously shipped in boxes with Styrofoam insulation, they can now be safely transported to their destination in the Landbox®, an ecological thermal packaging made of straw. Styrofoam and plastic are a thing of the past.

In a further step, the fully automatic PadPak compact machine, which produces padding material for small and medium-sized shipping goods, joined the equipment. This was a great relief, especially when shipping small parcels. The new padding material makes it faster and easier for the staff to handle. Foil pads will completely disappear from the re-natur packaging zone: "ratioform has also set up a cardboard shredder with which we can produce our own filling material from old cardboard boxes. This saves us costs, our waste is reduced and customers can put the filling material directly into the recycling cycle. A round thing!", Baumhauer thinks.

The conclusion

Baumhauer is very satisfied with ratioform's professional advice and conversion: "Both sustainability and economic efficiency were taken into consideration. And not only that, processes were also optimised and the employees were relieved".

ratioform as well as re-natur consider the topic of sustainability as an ongoing project. Research results for environmentally friendly substitutes are permanently monitored. In the future, both companies will continue to pursue the topic and optimise packaging solutions, procedures and processes in the sense of holism.