At Greif, we realize environmentally conscious business practices are not only key to our success, but also our customers’ and their respective customers’. We also realize that with a diverse and global supply chain, it is harder to make big changes in a short period of time. On this journey of continuous improvement and sustainability, we recommend introducing small incremental changes today that can lead to big improvements over time for you, your customers, and their customers in turn.
We are 12 years into our sustainability journey and many customers ask us what actions they can take to be more sustainable. For addressing this question, we invented The Greif Green Tool, to lead with facts about the positive impact a change of material, design, and/or construction can make. We always begin by asking whether the intent is to reduce carbon footprint or zero waste to landfill, as these two objectives are sometimes conflicting. To recycle and sustainably dispose of packaging without facts is hard, as we all know from handling our household waste. For industrial packaging, we are here to help.
We are often asked whether our fibre drums are sustainable. Our fibre drums are made of a renewable, responsibly sourced material, and are lightweight. These are positive characteristics for their environmental performance and a low climate change impact of transports. Additionally, depending on the use, our fibre drums can be recycled. At Greif, the all-fibre All-Fi and Ro-Con constructions can be recycled at most of our Greif mills, and our Austell, GA mill also accepts drums with liners and barriers. With our recycling service, we are able to support our customers in reaching their zero waste to landfill sustainability goals.
Other fibre drum constructions require dechiming for recycling. Dechiming, collection, and transportation of the drums to the mills are the largest hurdles for our customers. We encourage our customers to look for opportunities for us to work together along the chain to resolve these challenges, and reach out to us with ideas. Regardless of disposal method, fibre drums are a sustainable packaging option with a lower total climate change impact than other equivalent rigid packaging.
Do you have questions or are you curious about learning more?
Contact our Global Product Manager for fibre drums Linea Olsson (linea.olsson@greif.com) or your local account manager. For information regarding our fibre recycling, please contact Bill Theado (bill.theado@greif.com).
The information shared in this article was made comparing Lok-Rim and All-Fi style fibre drums to equivalent design open head plastic and steel drums as produced by Greif using internal data. Assumptions made include covers and lockbands (all easily removable parts) being recycled for all drums.
