Field notes
Methods, failures and follow-ups. We publish what we test so you can argue with it.
Logistics
Pallet cube is a packaging decision
Nobody owns the gap between the top of the last case and the roof of the trailer. It is usually the biggest number on the table.
· Marcus Oyelaran
Materials
Recycled content is a supply question
Specifying 50% PCR is easy. Holding it across a year of production is a different problem, and it is not a materials problem.
· Rina Okonkwo
Practice
Reuse only works if it comes back
A reusable pack is worse than a single-use one until it has completed enough trips. The return rate decides where that line falls.
· Rina Okonkwo
Materials
What "recyclable" means to a sorting line
A material is recyclable if a machine can identify it at speed. Most specifications never mention the machine.
· Tomas Vidal
Materials
"Compostable" is not a material
It describes an end-of-life route that depends on infrastructure most of your customers do not have. Here is what to ask instead.
· Rina Okonkwo
Materials
Paper is not automatically better
Fibre wins on collection and loses on barrier and weight. Which of those matters depends on your product, not on the material.
· Priya Raghunathan
Testing
The seal window is the whole job
Most material substitutions do not fail as materials. They fail as seals, in the third hour of a shift.
· Tomas Vidal
Testing
The drop test lies, and everyone knows it
Standard transit tests model a journey nobody takes. What we do instead, and why it costs less than it sounds.
· Tomas Vidal
Testing
Condensation, not cold, breaks cold-chain packs
Fibre packaging rarely fails at temperature. It fails on the way back up, in the twenty minutes nobody instruments.
· Priya Raghunathan
Regulation
EPR changed the arithmetic, quietly
Modulated fees moved the cost of a bad material from nowhere onto your P&L. Most packaging decisions were made before that was true.
· Rina Okonkwo
Practice
We told a client to do nothing
Their packaging was already the lowest-impact option available. The interesting part is why nobody had told them.
· Rina Okonkwo
Regulation
Thirty percent is a cliff, not a slope
The Plastic Packaging Tax threshold means 29% recycled content and 30% are very different products commercially. They are nearly identical technically.
· Marcus Oyelaran
Logistics
One mill in Europe makes it
A material with a single qualified supplier is not a material decision. It is a single point of failure with a datasheet.
· Marcus Oyelaran
Materials
Mono-material pouches, two years on
We put six brands onto recyclable mono-PE pouches in 2024. Here is what actually happened to them.
· Tomas Vidal
Practice
Downgauge before you substitute
The cheapest packaging improvement is usually less of what you already use, and it is the one nobody gets excited about.
· Rina Okonkwo
Materials
The ink and the adhesive decide it
Two percent of the pack by weight routinely determines whether the other ninety-eight can be recycled.
· Priya Raghunathan
Practice
Why we publish our methods
A test result you cannot interrogate is a claim. We publish the conditions so you can disagree with them.
· Tomas Vidal
Testing
Vibration does the damage, drops get the budget
Impact testing is dramatic and cheap to film. Most transit damage arrives slowly, over four hundred miles of motorway.
· Marcus Oyelaran
test
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