Thermo Electric is proud to share a best practice on a successful sustainability initiative to reduce waste with new packaging. One of Thermo Electric’s key customers has been using tens of thousands of high temperature sensors for over 10 years. Those specific high precision sensors, made with ceramics, are used in critical applications.
The ceramic design offers the advantage of high insulating properties at very high temperatures, but also the disadvantage of being very fragile. To mitigate the risk of damaging during shipment, Thermo Electric has been using a very conservative packaging method based on individually bubble wrapping each sensor.
For years this packaging has protected many ceramic thermocouples, but none of the packaging was reusable.
Following an initiative to offer more durable and sustainable packaging to our customers, our Thermo Electric team, thanks to a close collaboration with its key customer, developed a stronger and more eco-friendly packaging. The new packaging had to deliver the objectives of limiting waste while not sacrificing the protection of our products during transportation and not increasing the shipping costs. We are happy to share that we succeeded as a team to deliver even more positive results that we originally planned.
The new packaging includes layers of customized high density foam. The foam has been designed internally and has been precisely pre-cut to match the exact dimension of each thermocouple. Although the cost of the foam is much higher than the bubble wrap, the foams durability allows for multiple uses/shipments. Another advantage of the foam packaging is time saved with packing and unpacking the shipments. The new packaging limits waste, but also provides a better customer experience. Our customer easily reships our empty box with the foam, which gets inspected, tested and if not damaged, reused again.
This change proved that by working as a team with our customer, we succeeded to limit waste, save time and offer a more durable packaging. All without impacting cost. Offering an environmental friendly solution is possible and does not need to be more expensive. We all just need to have the mindset of asking ourselves “what can be done differently to limit waste and maximize recycling?”.
Our team, along with our customer, did just that.