EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

A group of graduate students and staff at Colorado State University (CSU) have developed a new type of clean-burning cookstove for developing countries. The Envirofit project recently won an ecological design award at the International Design Excellence Awards.

It also deserves awards for packaging. The company saves material, space and shipping costs by making octagonal boxes for the round cookstoves. They realize you don’t need to put a round peg into a square hole. Right now, as we buy, wrap and open boxes full of presents, wasteful packaging is hard to ignore. But companies could save money, be more eco-conscious and reduce our frustration with simpler, easier to open, less wasteful packaging.

Packaging Exposé
Mother Jones magazine recently quantified “wrap rage” in a fun, if aggravating, fact sheet. (It’s a print exclusive, so I can’t link to it. But you can read it in the November/December 2009 issue at your library.) The piece notes that Americans threw away 78.5 million tons of packaging in 2007, adding up to one third of all waste. We recycle only 43% of it.

We produce an extra million tons of garbage per week during the silly season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. My favorite piece of the article is a breakout box regarding the 820 square inches of cardboard and 580 square inches of plastic used to package a Barbie doll that took handy adults with tools 25 minutes to open.

Octagonal Boxes
Back to those CSU cookstoves. They are sold in India and other developing countries, where families burn wood, coal or dung for cooking, filling their homes and the air with pollution. The Envirofit stoves burn more efficiently and release far fewer emissions. They also pipe them outside the home.

The inventors didn’t stop with the product in considering efficiency. Envirofit recently switched to the octagonal boxes, reducing the financial and environmental impact of transporting the stoves around the world. For example, the company can fit more stoves in a shipping container by packing the octagons honeycomb-style.

Packaging Guidelines
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition is helping other companies get their packaging houses in order. This month, it released a set of eco packaging metrics to guide companies toward less wasteful packaging.

The group recognizes that many companies want financial incentives to reduce packaging. One of the guidelines regards cost and performance (including transport packaging cube efficiency—let’s hear it for octagons). Their protocols also deal with:

• Material use and waste reduction (particularly virgin materials)
• Total life cycle energy and water use
• Material toxicity
• Clean, low-carbon transport
• Community and worker impacts

Wal-Mart has its own packaging scorecard. Companies that want to sell at the world’s biggest retailer will need to pay attention to their boxes. And most do. That should engender a lot of positive change.

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