Beyond ensuring that their wood is logged from sustainable forests, home-grown ETH Enterprise is the first in Singapore to try to work out the carbon dioxide equivalent stored in their packaging materials. With more attention being paid to corporate social responsibility (CSR) these days, ETH says that sourcing from sustainable resources is the way forward for packaging materials.
The company, which focuses on crate customisation, logistics, and timber trading and production, is the only company in Singapore to use 100 per cent sustained, certified materials for their pallets and crates for their packaging operations, according to ETH Enterprise director Tok Chuan Hoo.
In July this year, ETH collaborated with the National University of Singapore (NUS) through The Logistics Institute – Asia-Pacific to conduct research and develop a system to compute the carbon footprint of their packaging products. Thus far, all their finished packing products have a negative carbon footprint, says Mr CH Tok. ‘This is a big contrast against plastic, steel, or other packing materials that have large positive carbon footprints.’
Negative footprint
As trees grow, they ‘fix’ carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by way of photosynthesis and store the carbon. As such, they are able to provide a negative, or neutral footprint (not leaving any carbon footprint) even after manufacturing, even though the process of manufacturing inevitably releases a certain amount of greenhouse gases into the environment.
With a system in place to compute the carbon footprint of their packaging products, the company is convinced that the green packaging solutions they provide will appeal to organisations with a strong CSR drive. ‘Through an awareness programme, backed by solid research, we’d like to dispel a common myth that wooden pallets are unfriendly to the environment,’ says Mr CH Tok.
Through the course of the project, which is slated to last for up to eight months, ETH hopes that their efforts will prove to be the catalyst for the packaging industry to push for a carbon footprint standard. ‘It is always the industry which pushes for standards and that’s where we are coming from,’ he adds.
But using timber alone is not sufficient, says ETH, which hopes to encourage other companies to purchase their timber from sustainable sources. ‘It is true that deforestation will harm the ecosystem,’ says Mr CH Tok. ‘So you have to practise sustainable resource extraction.’
In sustainable resource extraction, possible damage to the environment is minimised and the future of the ecosystem is ensured through planting or seeding of a new forest after the tree is cut down.
‘Ensuring that companies use timber from sustainable sources as an industry standard will not be easy; people won’t like it because sustainable wood is more expensive, and less available, particularly if you are sourcing from Asia,’ he admits. ‘Particularly so for this industry, where the practice of buying non-sustainable wood has been around for many years, and people are comfortable with this.’
While suppliers from Australia, New Zealand, and Europe largely practice sustainable forestry, this is less practised in Asia. As such, many companies source their wood from non-certified, or ‘unknown sources’, due to its easy availability and lower cost.
While sourcing for sustainable wood does command a premium over wood from unknown sources, ETH notes that customers are starting to come round to it, with their packaging arm experiencing steady growth.
ETH director Kenny Tok attributes this to better educated consumers. He says: ‘With greater awareness, everybody is looking into ways to contribute less harm to the environment. In the past, everybody just did business with the aim of garnering the best profit. But today, the business environment has changed.’
Depletion of unknown sources
‘We feel that sustainable forests are the future,’ adds Mr CH Tok. ‘If we can show our customers that our products are sustainable, they may be more inclined to use our products. Right now, we may not be as competitive as others price-wise, but the day will come when we are on par because unknown sources are depleting by the year, and in the process getting more expensive. No doubt there’s still a big gap, but we hope that with increased awareness, customers will lean toward buying our products in the future.’
Their timber processing arm, which processes wood for sale to developed countries for the construction of door frames, decks, and other house components, ensures that the wood they use is from verified legal origins, in which harvesting is done based on each country’s regulations. In Indonesia, their wood is certified by the Rainforest Alliance.
‘Even for manufacturing, our customers require that we certify our materials,’ says Mr CH Tok. ‘In New Zealand for instance, as of September, they don’t allow non- certified wood to come in. It has to be certified by a third- party auditor.’
Such response from customers is a daily validation for the brothers, whose company, even when it was helmed by their father in the 1970s, used recycled wood as a source of raw material. Mr CH Tok concludes: ‘Every one of us has to be responsible to our environment in one form or the other. Choosing sustainable resources is the only way to keep our planet Earth sustainable for our future generations.’
