Sustainable Packaging Solutions

Packaging is a necessary part of how we care for people. It’s how food that is grown in one part of the world makes its way to people in another part of the world. It’s how we get medicine into the hands of people who need it. We touch the lives of people around the world every day with the products that we package, but we have an opportunity to do it in a better way.

At BW Packaging, we're taking responsibility for infusing sustainable thinking into our business culture and practices. We invite you to learn more about our commitment to sustainability, sustainable packaging solutions, and our caring team members below.

Our Commitment

Packaging Solutions

People Who Care

Our Sustainability Commitment

BW Packaging addresses the issues of packaging waste and climate change in three main ways: collaboration, innovation, and education. Hover over each option below to learn more about these initiatives.

Collaboration

Building relationships with conscious customers and industry partners.

Collaborating with Customers

Through intentional conversations and trials with our customers, we gain important insights that allow us to develop value-added packaging solutions that support corporate sustainability initiatives. This collaboration also allows us to educate ourselves on changing customer needs so we can continue to be the best sustainable packaging partners possible. This collaboration includes everything from sustainable material trials to disclosing scope three emissions data.

Collaborating with Industry Partners

By engaging with organizations like PMMI and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), BW Packaging exchanges valuable perspectives and information that is crucial to overcoming the global packaging waste and climate change crises. As a leading OEM, our participation in these communities plays an important role in the development of solutions and industry standards, which benefit us all. We invite you to add BW Packaging to your CDP profile here.

Vision & Pledge

Sustainability Vision

BW Packaging's sustainability commitment is deeply rooted in our guiding principle of measuring success by the way we touch people’s lives. We aim to use business as a force for good in the world, and as such, we collaborate with partners across the value chain to ensure solutions are implemented in beneficial ways for our customers, team members and the communities we serve. As we pursue our commitment to carbon reductions, we lean on our environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies to guide our actions within our business and along our value chain connections outside of our organization.

Climate Pledge

In 2024, we announced a climate pledge to reduce BW Packaging’s scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030 on our path to net zero, using 2021 as our baseline year. To achieve this target, we are exploring various opportunities to improve its manufacturing footprint. These initiatives include renewable power procurement, LED lighting retrofits, optimized HVAC controls, operations settings management, destratification fan installation and more.

Innovation

Considering environmental impacts when designing new packaging solutions.

Innovation

Sustainable design thinking is embedded throughout our innovation process, beginning with customer interviews. Before we design new solutions, we take time to learn and discuss the specific challenges our customers are trying to overcome. We ask thought-provoking questions to help them fully understand the realities of material compatibility, resource efficiency, and other machinery-related considerations. By collaborating with us early, our customers have a higher success rate at bringing their sustainably packaged products to market sooner.

In addition to new machinery, we offer tooling upgrades and other retrofit solutions to support our customers’ sustainability initiatives without the need for significant capital investment. Whether you’d like to upgrade your existing rigid or flexible packaging machinery, we’ve got you covered.

Education

Improving organizational competency by learning and growing together.

Education

From climate change to the circular economy, ESG to EPR, sustainability is a complex, multi-faceted topic. It challenges those of us in the manufacturing industry every day, and for some, the learning curve is quite steep. For this reason, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to elevate our organizational competency with training and resources that are geared toward educating our own team members on the ins and outs of sustainability. In doing so, we’re preparing our team – everyone from our applications engineers to our aftermarket support specialists – to be the best partners possible for our environmentally conscious customers and industry partners.

For answers to your questions about packaging machinery and its role in sustainability, we invite you to subscribe to our sustainable packaging blog. For resources to help you kickstart your own ESG program, we recommend downloading PMMI's guide: Journey to a Successful ESG Program, co-developed by BW Packaging's Global Sustainable Packaging Leader Michelle Bryson.

Our Partner Organizations

Sustainable Packaging Coalition Membership

Sustainable Packaging Solutions

BW Packaging offers sustainable packaging solutions for a variety of packaging and decoration types including bags, pouches, bottles, bowls, trays, cups, cans and various label solutions. Hover over the options below to learn more about our sustainable packaging solutions.

Bags & Pouches

Sustainable Solutions for Flexible Packaging— explore everything BW Flexible Systems has to offer.
Flexible Packaging Solutions for Recyclability (Video)

Bottles

Sustainable Bottle Blowing, Filling & Capping (Video)
CombiBlow PET Bottle Blower and Filler— Synerlink has developed CombiBlow, an all-in-one bottling solution that efficiently blows, fills and caps PET bottles at speeds of up to 8,000 bottles-per-hour.

Bowls & Trays

Denesting Solutions for Fiber Bowls & Trays (Video)
Reciprocating Tray Denester— To support the broader implementation of fiber-based containers, BW Integrated Systems collaborates with fiber bowl and tray providers to separate their products with pick-and-place denesters

Cans

Can Filling & Seaming Solutions— Pneumatic Scale Angelus actively partners with leading can makers to anticipate and mitigate any can handling challenges introduced by new, lighter-weight can designs.
Can End Handling & Conveyance— BW Integrated Systems’ can conveyance and end of line packaging equipment can efficiently handle more than 10,000 aluminum can-ends-per-minute.

Cups

Sustainable Cup Thermoforming Solutions (Video)
Cutting Tools for PET Cup FFS Lines (Video)
Cup Form-Fill-Seal (FFS) Machines— Synerlink delivers form-fill-seal solutions that can efficiently thermoform PET, polypropylene, and other fully-recyclable plastics at speeds between 36,000-57,000 cups per hour.
Snapcut Cutting Tool Technology— Synerlink has developed a cutting tool technology – Snapcut – that can cut and pre-cut PET, rPET, polypropylene, and other recyclable plastics at a thickness of below 0.7 millimeters.

Labels

Converting Solutions for Sustainable Shrink Sleeve Films (Video)
Shrink Sleeve Converting Equipment— Accraply partners with sustainable label suppliers to test and validate their solutions on shrink sleeve converting machines.

People Who Care

New sustainability leaders are stepping up across the BW organization every day. From solar panels to composting, buying refurbished furniture and more, we have so many stories to share. Peruse the stories below to get new ideas for how you can show that you care.

Lina Valencia-Shaw: Home-grown Fruits and Vegetables

Lina is an Accounts Payable Associate for BW Packaging. As she learned more about how the agricultural industry contributes to deforestation, soil depletion, and CO2 emissions, she became determined to grow more sustainable food in her community. Six years ago, she started volunteering to grow fruits and vegetables for the local food bank utilizing sustainable growing methods. To this day, she maintains a garden in which she grows fresh, sustainable produce that she gives back to her community.
Jason Rebeck: Silverware & Solar Panels
As the Office Coordinator for Accraply (a BW Packaging company), Jason has assisted in the office’s transition away from plastic plates and plasticware to washable ceramic plates and silverware. This switch helps to eliminate landfill waste from disposable, single-use plastic plates and utensils. Not content to settle for just one sustainability initiative, Jason is also working with BW’s Property Management Group with the goal of installing solar panels on the Accraply facility by 2025.
Michelle Bryson: Switching to Reusable Makeup Wipes

As the Global Sustainable Packaging Leader for BW Packaging, Michelle Bryson is always looking for new ways to live and work sustainably. Recently, she started removing her makeup with a reusable makeup wipe rather than throwing out a disposable, hard-to-recycle wipe every day. With her reusable wipe, Michelle is saving hundreds of disposable wipes per year from ending up in landfills. She encourages any makeup-wearers out there to give a reusable wipe a try!
Taz Lombardo: Composting Food Scraps

To live more sustainably, Taz Lombardo, BW Packaging’s Content Marketing Leader, has taken up composting. Every week, Taz fills a plastic container with kitchen food scraps and places it in his freezer. After a few weeks, he adds the scraps to the compost tumbler, mixing it about once a week to help the composting process. He can then use the composted material as a natural fertilizer, both saving food scraps from going to waste and preventing greenhouse gasses caused by decomposing food.