Consider environmental issues in procurement to reduce total costs and make your enterprise more competitive.

Historically, packaging was mainly used to transport goods, particularly foodstuffs, from their place of manufacture direct to the customer. Packaging later became prominent in the preserving of food products for longer periods. The packaging revolution has continued, catering to an ever-expanding range of consumer products that are sold through ever-widening chains of distribution.

Packaging is a vital sector of most national economies. It consumes large quantities of resources. Because of packaging’s often limited life span, these resources (of materials and energy) are viewed in some quarters as being wasted. As a result, there is increasing pressure to minimize packaging volumes and make it reusable, or at least recyclable to recover materials or save energy. Growing realization of the need to plan for a sustainable future is creating the climate for an era of dramatic change in this industry.

Environment and trade is a challenging issue that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has to tackle. The scarcity of statistically well-grounded information makes the task even more complex. Using market analysis tools developed by ITC with data derived from the United Nations COMTRADE database and UNCTAD’s database on trade barriers, a pioneering study to be published later this year tries to put some figures into the debate.

Voluntary forest management certification and associated wood labelling schemes are becoming accepted as a way to help markets contribute to the conservation of tropical and other types of forests.

- Sustainable forest management is “the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfil, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions, at local, national and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecosystems”. (Definition of the Helsinki Declaration of the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe, 1993.)

The world’s major retailers of wood products are increasingly adopting policies which favour certified wood products, and are communicating their policies more explicitly.