Month: July 2023

Content created and originally published by America’s Plastic Makers

Meet Ron Cotterman, Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs at SEE® (formerly Sealed Air).

Ron is an innovator and a motivator. And throughout his 37-year career, two things have never changed for him.

“If I had to give advice to a young person starting out, I probably would say, ‘Stay true to your objectives. Set a goal for yourself and be passionate about what you do.’ Because having that purpose and that passion to follow through is key to everything that we do.”

Purpose and passion. Ron has been applying these two attributes for decades at a company known for an iconic product — Bubble Wrap® — that protects our valuables.

“Bubble Wrap’s first application was as a wallpaper. But its better application was protection. And one of the first products that it protected was something called a computer made by IBM.”

He and his company kept innovating to create similar packaging to protect our food supply.

“We all value the ability to go to a grocery store and select a wide variety of food items that are designed to be nutritious, safe and fresh and delivered in a very efficient manner. The innovation of plastic packaging enabled whole new categories of foods to be available to people as part of their diets in a very convenient and efficient way.”

His company, SEE, is now applying that innovation in a new area: sustainability.

In his role as vice president of global corporate affairs at SEE, Ron is bringing awareness to the circularity of packaging materials and the benefits it brings to society.

“How can we take packaging materials that extend the shelf-life of food, that help protect things through e-commerce, and get those materials back so they can be recycled and put back into new products?”

And in that role, he’s inspiring a new generation to bring purpose and passion to helping protect our food. Our products. Our lives.

And our planet.

Meet Ron. One of America’s Change Makers.

Sustainability is key to decisions at SEE, a packaging solutions provider, and for today’s plastic makers.

“Up until about 15 years ago, we never even used the term sustainability. But now we try to bring sustainability to life, to really understand what it means.”

“Sustainability is defined in three parts: the economy, the environment, and the social impact. We have to remember that packaging doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists to move products to meet consumer demand, to allow people to have the quality of life in terms of the choice for their food. And today in e-commerce to buy goods and services.”

SEE’s R&D teams are focused on the environmental aspect of sustainability, including “designing for recyclability.”

“We are a packaging manufacturer, so sustainability means creating the packaging in a form that can actually be recycled, helping ensure it is collected and can be made back into new packaging. We use design for recyclability in our everyday processes.”

The concept of designing for recycling is expanding due to innovative technologies.

“A few years ago, we were talking about design for recyclability as being specifically restricted to what we call mechanical recycling, what most of our municipal recycling facilities utilize. But today advanced recycling adds a new dimension to the way we can envision the use of materials, their recovery, and their reuse into new packaging.”

Advanced recycling technologies allow us to dramatically expand the types and amount of plastic that can be recycled.

“Advanced recycling to us is a natural extension of the mechanical recycling processes that are widely used today. Advanced recycling uses heat or energy to take plastic products and break them down into their building blocks to be reused. It allows us a broader selection of materials that we can use to provide even better packaging performance for things such as fresh cheese, meat, or other perishable goods in the grocery store.”

Sustainability is a natural passion for Ron. As father to three adult sons, he’s been motivated to make the world a better place.

“I think my kids are probably saying, ‘Well, Dad is out there trying to save the world, one package at a time.’ I’ve always tried to embed in my kids what can they do to help make the world a better place.”

And as a senior leader at his company, Ron spends a lot of time motivating and mentoring younger professionals who will someday take his place.

“My passion has always been to bring technology into a space that I can apply it to develop new things to make people see things in new ways. To kind of see the impact that they can have based on technical training, based on their personal interests, based on many aspects of their life. How do you motivate people to rise to a higher level of contribution to society?”

To Ron, it all comes down to the two things that can inspire people to innovate and solve real world problems.

“If you can bring purpose and passion together and motivate someone to drive towards greater goals and outcomes… My feeling is that person can contribute not only to their own personal satisfaction but to great contributions to society overall.”

______________________________________________

Meet Timi Fadiran, another Change Maker from SEE. ____________________________________________

 The story of plastic is evolving. And it’s being written by our scientists, engineers, designers, technicians, innovators, and others—America’s Change Makers—who are leading sustainable change for America’s Plastic Makers. Read about more of America’s Change Makers here.

 

Originally published on TriplePundit

For many people, when they think about shipping, what might come to mind is taking a package to the post office or receiving something from Amazon.

For CNH Industrial, a manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment, shipping might mean moving a 24-ton tractor out of wintry Fargo, North Dakota, or a bulky combine harvester from Nebraska to the easternmost parts of Europe.

The sheer size of these pieces of equipment, long lead times, and often months-long journeys from factory to final customer means that pretty much every shipment is meticulously and uniquely planned. A single shipment might involve transportation across road, rail, ocean and river as the machine progresses toward the end customer.

Due to physical constraints, the choice of options is often limited when moving a heavy object like a combine harvester to its final destination. Logistics planners must negotiate seasonality requirements and assess the routes and modes of transport that are even capable of handling such outsize equipment, while still meeting customer requirements and expectations.

As tough as this job can be, CNH Industrial strives to be mindful about doing things in as environmentally beneficial a way as possible.

Alberto Mela, transport logistics director at CNH Industrial, explained the approach the company takes in moving these massive pieces of equipment, and the challenges and opportunities to mitigate emissions as his team goes about their daily business.

Sustainability in logistics: Making sustainable choices on a journey from Nebraska to the Balkans

“We’re always focused on alternative ways of managing transport, because as a company we are focused on reducing emissions,” Mela says. “We always have, as our target, ways to develop initiatives that can reduce emissions. It also has to be operationally beneficial.”

Generally speaking, achieving environmental improvements means keeping shipments of these huge pieces of equipment off the roads. To that end, Mela says, “we don’t see the road as the future,” citing pollution, traffic volumes and increasing regulatory constraints in Europe as examples of the problems encountered with this transportation mode.

That doesn’t mean the road can always be avoided, but the company can still try to limit it wherever possible.

Take shipments of combine harvesters that the company has to plan. These originate in Grand Island, Nebraska, and on one of their supply routes, they have to make their way to Ruse in Bulgaria.

Total end-to-end shipping from Nebraska to Bulgaria can take anywhere from two to three months to execute. However you break down the journey, logistics managers like those at CNH Industrial are stuck with only one transportation-mode option for certain legs of the journey. Crossing the Atlantic, for example, has to be by ocean, and some of the journey in Western Europe has to be over the road.

However, with optimal planning, other parts of the journey can be arranged to dovetail environmentally advantageous objectives with desired operational benefits. For example, the U.S. leg from Nebraska to the Atlantic Ocean port in Baltimore can sometimes be shifted to rail.

This is by no means the easiest option. Shipping by road is both faster and more flexible than rail. It takes five days to move product to Baltimore by road and 15 days by rail, Lauren Ehleiter, CNH Industrial’s North America outbound manager says. The company would also have to ship multiple combines together on this leg of the journey to even make rail viable.

But if CNH Industrial analyzes when customers need the equipment in Europe, it can spot opportunities to consolidate different orders together to make this leg of the journey by train. And there is a benefit in switching even part of this leg to rail.

For example, the company can ship via road to Chicago and by rail the rest of the way, which takes 10 days. Since that five-day difference might be critical in allowing the necessary consolidation of shipments to Baltimore, the road/rail combination can still offer a sweet spot to achieve efficiencies.

Once they leave the port of Baltimore, the combines are shipped by sea to Zeebrugge in Belgium. Ocean is the only mode of transportation available for this leg of course, but still, with limited sailings, the timing of arrival in Baltimore from Nebraska is critical to meet vessel departures. It’s all part of the planning!

From Zeebrugge to Duggendorf in Germany, European rail constraints force shipments back onto the road. But in Duggendorf, instead of continuing by road, the combines can be shipped the rest of the way to Bulgaria by river barge.

Going by barge from Duggendorf again allows CNH Industrial to plan for the environmentally favorable option while enjoying an operational benefit. In this case, the operational benefit is being able to dock in Ruse, Bulgaria, on the south side of the Danube River. Happily, that means avoiding an otherwise problematic bridge crossing that would be necessary if coming from the north side of the river by road.

When putting these supply chains together, “the key is planning,” Mela explains, adding that while you cannot always optimize for the most sustainable solution, his team at CNH Industrial always looks for ways to do it when they can.

Making sustainable shifts on shipping within Europe

Another example of CNH Industrial trying to leave the road behind is the intra-European transportation of tractors manufactured in Turkey.

Historically, these would all ship by ocean vessel to the port of Livorno on the west coast of Tuscany, and move by road to the company’s distribution facility in the northern Italian city of Parma. The tractors were then distributed from Parma by road to their end customers throughout Europe.

But now, “we are looking to change this paradigm,” Mela says. Again, this involves moving freight more often by sea. Already, the company is reaching markets in Spain and Portugal by shipping to seaports in Barcelona and Valencia.

Building further on the concept, as of May this year, CNH Industrial has also swapped road freight for sea freight to reach customers in France. By shipping to the port of Sète in southern France, the company can bypass the Parma distribution center altogether and avoid road transportation all the way from Italy to the French border.

Next, CNH Industrial hopes to ship directly by ocean to the U.K. market, too.

It’s not easy, but it can work

While out of sight for many people, logistics is a huge, multi-trillion-dollar industry, with a consequently huge carbon footprint. While it’s not an easy fix to make logistics more environmentally sustainable, CNH Industrial, by way of making changes to supply chains as described here, illustrates there are always opportunities to do better.

“It’s complex,” says Mela, talking about new systems being put in place for transporting tractors manufactured in Turkey. “When renegotiating these flows, we have to weigh environmental considerations against a combination of drivers such as quality, time and cost.”

The main shipping carriers are also doing their part, said Selma Maia, transport logistics vice president at CNH Industrial. “We are starting to see that our shipping partners are making large investments in committing to zero net carbon emissions,” she said.” The main ocean shipping lines are looking at their flows, purchasing new vessels that run on greener fuels and seriously committing to rolling out their reduced carbon freight initiatives in the coming years.”

But when the overarching objective is to mitigate emissions, even when options are limited moving such large pieces of equipment, it’s worth the effort.

This article series is sponsored by CNH Industrial and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team.

Image courtesy of CNH Industrial