Small changes. Big impact. Building a sustainable supply chain.

At Avery Dennison, we're committed to minimizing our environmental footprint. That's why we're constantly collaborating to discover new ways to boost energy efficiency, reduce waste, increase recycling, source responsibly and lower our emissions.

Minimizing the environmental impact of our operations and supply chain is a big part of our 2030 sustainability goals. One way we’re doing this is by rethinking the packaging we use across our logistics in EMENA. But how have we made changes that matter?

See how we have created a cleaner and safer
environment for our customers; featuring Aurika and
Geostick.

What if swapping wood for plastic could save CO2?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wooden pallets were incredibly difficult to source from our suppliers. Compounding this problem was the fact that when pallets were promised, sometimes they never arrived. The price of wooden pallets also increased due to high demand and low supply.

These issues offered us an opportunity to rethink how we were shipping our products across Europe. In a way, it was good timing: We were already looking into ways to reduce the use of wooden pallets, which often break, are hard to source responsibility and in the end, contribute to a lot of waste.

Replacing wood with reusable plastic pallets was the solution we landed on. But you might be asking: Isn’t swapping wood for plastic a bit counter-intuitive? Isn’t plastic bad for the environment?

The fact is, plastic pallets are durable. They can be reused more often than wooden ones as they’re less prone to breakages. This has an added advantage, since broken pallets can often lead to loss of stock and wasted material in the supply chain. Naturally, the fewer pallets you use in the long run, saves on waste as well.

In 2021, we decided to partner with Tosca, a global leader in reusable plastic packaging and performance pooling solutions, to kick off a trial of euro-sized plastic pallets in the Irish market. How it works is simple. We use the plastic pallets to ship products to our customers. Once the pallets are emptied, Tosca picks them up, inspects and washes them, and then the pallets are delivered back to our production sites based on our shipment needs. Tosca estimates that its plastic pallets can be used over a 100 times, contributing to a more circular economy. At their end of life, the pallets can even be recycled.

To make this switch possible, we needed our customers to buy into the program as well. That’s where our sales team was essential. They checked with our customers to make sure they were ready to make the transition. Luckily, we’ve had a high rate of adoption and were able to expand the program beyond Ireland. Today we have more than 400 customer locations in 26 countries signed up for the plastic pallet pooling initiative.

At the end of every year, Avery Dennison and customers taking part in the pooling program can receive a CO2 emissions reduction certificate of the usage of Tosca L1 plastic pallets vs wooden Euro-size pallets. In 2024, we saved 671 tons of CO2.

That’s big.

Small changes. Big impact. Building a sustainable supply chain.

Packaged goods on plastic pallets (blue)
without wooden topboards.

Removing unnecessary topboards

To further optimize our logistics, we decided to develop better ways to ship our products without the use of wasteful top boards.

What are top boards? These are pieces of wood placed on top of a shipment to protect the product from being damaged by the tight, plastic straps used to secure the shipment to a pallet. In some cases, top boards enable pallets to be stacked on top of one another when boxes are used in the packing, saving space in the warehouse. Top boards can, theoretically, be reused, but like wooden pallets, they become quickly dirty and break easily. In other words, they contribute to a lot of waste.

Top boards seemed like a logical component of a shipment where we could reduce waste. For Avery Dennison, topboards offer no added value at customers’ end — we do not use boxes with our shipments and we advise our customers not to stack our products on top of each other due to the potential for damage. The extra wood, in our case, was doing nothing.

Example of pallets packed
with wooden topboard.

The question remained: How can we remove the top board and still protect our shipments as much as possible? To answer this challenge, we developed a new way to strap the pallets to secure our product. This meant modifying the packalines at certain locations and adding plastic wrapping to ensure the new strapping held throughout shipment. While this required using a bit more plastic, suggesting more waste, it actually turned into carbon and material savings for us and our partners. First, by removing the top board, our pallets weigh less, reducing energy expenditure during shipping. Second, by using plastic wrap, we ensure that the packaging we use, including our PE labels, are all mono material, enabling us and our partners to recycle all packaging in one stream. This reduces the waste often involved in using multiple materials during logistics.

We’re still piloting this program, as in some of our packing locations equipment is needed that can handle the new packaging process. We are working with our engineering teams to make investments to upgrade our packaging lines to accommodate this new process. Still, with the small changes we’ve already made, we estimate our carbon footprint reduction at about 100 tons per year.

Making our pallet labels more recyclable

Pallet labels are also an unnoticed contributor to waste. Often, pallet labels are made from paper which is wrapped or covered in plastic to keep it secure and readable throughout a shipment. This can create problems when trying to recycle waste — mixed materials, such as combining PE and paper, do not fit easily into most recycling streams and mixed waste ends up in a landfill or is incinerated.

In addition, we recognized that the labels we were using for shipments were too large and worse, several labels were often placed for shipping manifests and information for retrieval by our customers. This was unnecessarily wasteful. We knew there was a better way.

We began collaborating internally between our packaging, IT, sales and operations teams to create a new design for our pallet labels. Packaging and IT first collaborated on making a switch from paper to PE labels. This would ensure that all of our pallet packaging would be monomaterial (PE), making it easier to recycle. At this stage, sales also had an important role in making sure our customers were able to accept these new labels on their end without disrupting business.

Multiple pallet labels were used previously (left).
Only one label is required now after streamlining the design (right).

As a second step, we decided to adapt the size of our pallet label to those already existing in other of our processes. This meant reducing our pallet label size and streamlining its content to allow us to use just one label for essential information on our pallets. To make this a reality, IT had to adapt our printing systems to a new labeling size and set up a way to include all of the shipping information onto one label rather than several. Printers capable of this change were already available in some parts of our production process, but several new printers had to be purchased to move from A4 labels to a smaller size. Also, PE labels required a different ink to have good printed readability. All of these small adjustments to our label support efforts to increase automatization of our packing operations, with our warehouse in DC Milano leading the way as our first fully-automated packaging line where the pallet labels are placed automatically.

After a lot of fine tuning, these pallet label improvements have been piloted with customers shipped from our Italian site. Thanks to the feedback received we could fine tune the last details and we plan for these new, waste reducing labels to be available throughout Europe sometime later this year.

In addition, we are going paperless for our packlist, providing a digital solution to our customers and further reducing waste throughout our logistics workflow. We are also integrating RFIDs into our plastic pallets to enable full order traceability in the future, making connecting the physical to the digital possible.

If you’re interested in joining our reusable pallet program or have any questions about our sustainability initiatives, please contact your Avery Dennison sales representative.

Materials

Types of packaging

Digital

Tools

Services

Small changes. Big impact. Building a sustainable supply chain.

See how we have created a cleaner and safer
environment for our customers; featuring Aurika and
Geostick.

Packaged goods on plastic pallets (blue)
without wooden topboards.

Example of pallets packed
with wooden topboard.

Multiple pallet labels were used previously (left).
Only one label is required now after streamlining the design (right).

Materials

Types of packaging

Digital

Tools

Services

Small changes. Big impact. Building a sustainable supply chain.

See how we have created a cleaner and safer environment for our customers; featuring Aurika and Geostick.

Packaged goods on plastic pallets (blue) without wooden topboards.

Example of pallets packed with wooden topboard.

Multiple pallet labels were used previously (left). Only one label is required now after streamlining the design (right).

See how we have created a cleaner and safer
environment for our customers; featuring Aurika and
Geostick.

Packaged goods on plastic pallets (blue)
without wooden topboards.

Example of pallets packed
with wooden topboard.

Multiple pallet labels were used previously (left).
Only one label is required now after streamlining the design (right).