Product and Packaging Waste in the supply chain affects profitability, reputations and relationships. Its importance continues to grow for consumers, trading partners, employees and other shareholders.

Supply chain, commercial, operations, marketing and sustainability practitioners all have a big influence through their day-to-day decisions about capacity, service levels, stock life, range, packaging design and management information.

Trading partners need to work together to improve performance as decisions made and actions taken to prevent waste in one part of the supply chain can have unintended consequences elsewhere; increasing waste overall.

Collaboration is key and ECR is the ideal forum to balance existing service and availability requirements along the supply chain with solutions developed to eliminate or better manage product and packaging waste.

Measurement is being used to be put supply chain waste prevention more firmly on the industry’s agenda. Thirty-four leading IGD members have signed up to the target to totally remove 75,000 tonnes of waste from their supply chains by the end of 2012. And because it’s not always possible to stop waste being created, the companies have also challenged themselves to divert a further 150,000 tonnes of waste from disposal, mainly from landfill and sewerage, to more productive outputs such as anaerobic digestion.