As one of the top brands in natural personal care, Burt’s Bees believes all packaging should hold to the highest standard possible of environmental sensitivity. Sustainability is inherently part of how Burt’s Bees does business: their ultimate goal is to be the “greenest personal care company on earth.”
As part of their continued development of sustainable packaging alternatives, they replaced the petroleum‐based PET thermoform tray in their product kits with a more sustainable option believed to be a first in the health and beauty category: a potato starch–based PaperFoam tray. This innovation not only improves the aesthetics of the finished package—a must for the category—but it also represents a sustainability win by using a renewable, recyclable, and compostable material for a key component used for product protection and display.
Performance
The new tray actually surpasses the performance of the original PET thermoform in a couple of key areas. The injection‐molded PaperFoam tray provides sharper definition and tighter tolerances than the thermoformed PET trays, thereby allowing the new trays to grip the kit components more tightly and keep them closer together. In addition, the PET trays were more susceptible to cracking, particularly during repositioning of product during assembly, leading to wasted trays. The new trays are more forgiving and allow repositioning of the product without damage to the tray itself.
Aesthetics
From an aesthetic perspective, the PaperFoam tray also dramatically improves the product view through the window and also allows Burt’s Bees brand managers and package designers more creative latitude as the tray can now be colored to add more shelf pop as needed.
Burt’s Bees lives up to its brand promise to be the “greenest personal care company on earth” by replacing it’s petrochemical based packaging components by biobased, recyclable and sustainable materials.
Burt’s Bees keeps on looking for ways to be more sustainable. The goal they want to reach by 2020 is to reduce their total packaging materials by 10%, increase recycled content of primary container packaging by 40%, and increase recyclability by 20%. By using PaperFoam for their gift packs we are bringing them closer to reach this sustainability goal.
