If you go into a supermarket and pick up any box of breakfast cereal from the shelf, the chances are it will have a bag inside it made of plastic that contains your cereal of choice. I have recently discovered that the amount of plastic used to make these bags can be reduced by 10-15% by simply changing the way that the bags are sealed. You’ll find that most of these cereal bags have a crimped seal at the top and bottom that is about 15mm wide. But by using a new method off sealing called the Integrity Seal ™ you can actually close the bag with a seal that is just 1.5mm wide. What’s more, the new seal is stronger and less likely to fail than the crimp seal so products will not leak from the bag and should stay fresher for longer.

Surely there will be a very high capital outlay to change to a machine that is capable of making such a seal? Well the inventors of the technology say that the technology can be retrofitted onto many form fill seal machines, so there’s no need to replace the whole thing which should make the cost of implementing this system more manageable. I spoke to Ceetak, the company who manufacture these retrofit solutions and they told me that although the technology was originally made with salad bags in mind via a project with WRAP, there is no reason why the sealing system should not work for cereal packets too. So today I will send them some samples of the sort of packs we make on our machines, they will reseal them for me using the Integrity seal ™ system and send them back to me so that we can assess the seal quality and overall look of the product and potential material and cost savings and decide whether we want to go any further with the project. I’m hopeful that this could be the next step in minimising the amount of packaging we use so I will post more about this when I have some results…

Alara has already been awarded Green Mark Level 1 for our environmental achievements so far, which is great. But now we’ve decided that it would be a good idea to move on from this standard and go for ISO 14001, the internationally recognised environmental standard. Why have we decided to switch? Well one reason is that ISO 14001 is an internationally recognised and is much more widely known than Green Mark. We are also anticipating that some of our customers may make it a requirement for their suppliers to have or be working towards ISO 14001. In addition to this it should formalise our efforts to make our business a sustainable one. At the moment we have an overall target to get to carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill and we are steadily working towards these, but we have no formal plan in place and no documentation to support what we are doing. Working towards the ISO standard should make the whole process a bit more coherent.

Implementing an Environmental Management System (EMS) is quite a task though. It requires documented procedures, written evidence and it needs to be maintained. So I’m anticipating that it will take several months to be awarded the standard even though we’re already doing a lot of good work because I need to go right back to the beginning and make sure that everything that the standard requires is included. To help us do this, we took advantage of a grant from the Manufacturing Advisory Service designed to help small manufacturers to achieve ISO 14001. The grant allows you to receive 5 days of consultancy for the price of one and was being administered by the London Environment Centre. It was really useful to discuss with the consultant exactly what was required and see examples of how it can be achieved. The first stage for us is to identify all of Alara’s environmental aspects and impacts. This includes everything from energy to light and heat the factory right down to the use of pens in an office. It’s a huge task. If the auditor can think of an environmental aspect that is not on your list, that’s a non-conformance and the list must be updated before the standard is awarded. So that’s as far as we’ve got at the moment and I think it will take a while longer before this first stage is complete. More updates on ISO 14001 progress to follow soon so watch this space…