You’re excited to get your latest laptop or device. It arrives in a lavishly designed, glossy box that is as attractive, if not more so, than the product you ordered. You open it carefully so as not to damage it. Someone spent a lot of time designing this package. But what could you use it for? It would be a shame to throw it out.

The prize for the most attractive packaging may go to Apple, but many other computer and smartphone manufacturers have followed Apple’s example. And while those beautiful boxes add to the appeal of the products, the material and mass of the packaging material will invariably end up in landfills—save for the few bits that can be recycled. You may give Apple packaging 5 stars, but the Earth gives it none.

Another tech company in Silicon Valley, and perhaps the most venerable, HP dedicates a team of 50 engineers to design the packaging of its products and has focused on reducing the amount of plastic in its packaging. An HP large format printer or 3D printer may arrive on your loading dock encased in the drabbest cardboard material available. It may look like it’s made from egg cartons—and it very well may have been.

We call up Erik Troelsen, director of E2E Sustainable Packaging at HP, at his home in Vancouver, Wash. to explain responsible package engineering. Troelsen’s packaging engineers manage to place product protection first and sustainability second. Aesthetics are important, too, but they are a distant third.

Troelsen, a mechanical engineer (BSME from MIT and MBA from Santa Clara University), has been attending to the packaging of HP products for much of his 26-year career, designing packaging for every HP product from a $59 printer to the half-million dollar Jet Fusion 5200 3D printer. He has led teams of packaging engineers and sourcing teams, optimized designs, forged worldwide supplier relationships and, most recently, initiated sustainability strategies. These days, Troelsen is all about making packaging more sustainable as the head of HP’s recently formed Molded Fiber Advanced Tooling Solutions business.

“We try to standardize packages as much as possible for cost reasons,” said Troelsen. “For an $80 printer, we spend a few dollars for the package, but for our more expensive products, a higher cost for packaging is justified.”

HP has long been on the forefront of sustainable products and packaging. The company was one of the first to embrace the concept of the circular economy, where product parts—and packaging—are reused rather than disposed of.

(People have left HP and continued their sustainability quest at other companies, for example, Lynelle Cameron, now vice president of Sustainability at Autodesk.)

Most material we place in the recycling bin is not recycled—we are sorry to find out. All that plastic you dutifully put in the recycling bin was just wishful thinking. A whopping 91 percent of plastic is not recycled, reports National Geographic. The truck that picks up empties from your recycling bin will dump its contents onto a conveyor belt where they will be picked over by workers. For any number of reasons, including contamination (meaning touched by food), the items will end up as landfill, be incinerated or be exported to other countries.

It used to be China, where once a manufacturing boom found value in the materials Western countries discarded. China imported as much as half of all the world’s trash at one time. But in 2018, China became more selective, employing “purity standards.” However, other (poorer) countries now await our trash. Currently, the U.S. exports its trash to Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Laos, Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal—countries with cheap labor and lax environmental rules, according to a 2020 article by Columbia University’s Climate School.

Sexy or sustainable? Pick one

Is any of that beautiful package recyclable?

Can the beautiful packaging we admire be sustainable? The packaging your iPhone arrives in can be bulky and most of its material nonrecyclable. My Lenovo mobile workstation came in a beautiful red and black box that, months later, remains under my desk, waiting for what, I don’t know, but I can’t face throwing it away.

The endcaps, the cardboardy pieces that held the mobile workstation by its edges, floating it in the box, may have been recycled material, says Troelsen, perhaps even made by us.

HP’s sustainable packaging division is in the business of supplying sustainable packaging solutions to everyone, not just to HP, explains Troelsen.

The typical sustainable packing material is made from plant fibers, like recycled wood and paper, and is formed by rather old-fashioned methods and machines in labor-intensive processes that require their production to be performed in far off places where labor is cheap.

With supply lines being disrupted (thanks, COVID), not only have computers and their components suffered delays, but so has their packaging.

This gave Troelsen an idea. Why not use our 3D printers to make modern machines that will produce the sustainable packaging material? It was an idea that led to the establishment of the E2E Sustainable Packaging Solutions and the Molded Fiber Advanced Tooling Solutions business, a company within a company, with vertical applications of molded fiber packaging and a charter to transform the packaging industry, combining sustainability with—if not aesthetically pleasing packaging—at least less ugly packaging, to everyone, even HP’s competitors.

HP announced the service to help companies migrate toward more eco-friendly packaging in September 2020 by providing the tooling for the packaging. Partnering with Pulp Moulding Dies Inc. (PMD) and Veritiv to design the tooling for pulp molded packaging for food & beverage, consumer electronics, and industrial markets. The service is initially available in Canada, Eastern Europe, Mexico, the U.S., and Western Europe.

A packaging engineer who wakes up to the alarm that plastics are ruining the world can check into HP’s site and send HP a design file (STEP or IGES). HP’s packaging experts will review the design and issue a quote. Upon approval, HP will start the manufacture of the tooling, using proprietary, purpose-built software. The production-ready tooling can arrive as soon as two weeks later, and according to HP, only then is it paid.

Molded fiber, aka molded pulp, can be made from a variety of materials, either naturally sourced (like sugar cane, bamboo, straw, wood fiber) as well as recycled man-made material (like newsprint, copier paper and cardboard). Since molded fiber can be made from recycled material and can itself be recycled, molded fiber could be the poster child of the environmental causes, the circular economy, and so on—were it not so unattractive.

The long fibers of the original plant material that are used to make paper are recovered by shredding the paper and soaking it in hot water. The drab gray color is the average of all the colors in the paper being recycled. The pock-marked, rough surface of molded fiber parts is the result of the wet slushy material being extruded through grating against a mold. The molded fiber form must be dried completely to have any strength. The heated water must now be removed with heat, making molded fiber somewhat energy intensive, so like most industrial processes, it is not completely green.

The most common use of molded fiber packaging is egg cartons. Your multiple Starbucks Ventis will be held up in a molded fiber tray. Consumers are quite accustomed to having their eggs and their hot and cold drinks delivered in drab material, but package designers, especially those who aspire to create packages like those used by Apple, are not as tolerant. Therefore, the use of molded fiber is confined to internal packaging.

The industry that has developed to produce and promote molded fiber is keen to make molded fiber look better. It can be made smoother, it can be patterned, and it can even have logos pressed into it.

HP’s commitment to sustainability precedes its recent packaging business. The company has racked up enough awards to ensure it a solid place as a sustainability leader among technology companies. We list a few of its achievements here:

• HP was a standout company in the 2020 CDP ratings and was the only tech to earn a quadruple “A” rating from CDP—one in each category: climate, forests, water and the “Supplier Engagement Leaderboard.” It was the 2nd year in a row that HP made three CDP A lists—the only North American company to do so. It as the 7th year in a row that HP was named to the CDP climate A List, and the 3rd time it made the water and forest A lists.
• HP came up first (ahead of Nvidia, Microsoft, Dell, which also were in the top 10) in Newsweek’s America’s Most Responsible Companies for the 2nd year in a row, ahead of more than 2,000 companies on environmental, social, and corporate governance in a U.S. survey with 7,500 respondents.
• HP was ranked 3rd overall and 1st in the technology industry and 3rd overall by 3BL Media in its 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2021 ranking of the 1,000 largest U.S. public companies, which was sorted by eight criteria: climate change, employee relations, environment, finance, governance, human rights, stakeholders and society, and ESG performance.
• HP made the 2020 Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the 9th year in a row. The Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, launched in 1999, has become a reference for investors seeking to invest in companies that are committed to sustainability.
• Ethisphere, which exists to define and advance standards of ethical business practices, including environmental practices, voted HP one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies in 2021. https://www.worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/
• HP received an ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Sustained Excellence award in the Product Brand Owner category from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is the 4th year in a row that HP has won this award, including the 2nd year it did so with the “Sustained Excellence” designation.