Our mission was to find badly or inefficiently wrapped products at our local Walmart that we thought could be better and more sustainably wrapped.

Walmart is looking for live cases for their Sustainable Packaging Exhibition and conference. Off we went shopping.

overwrap reduces film use over 18%

Like the animals on the ark, we came back with two of everything – everything we thought we could improve the wrapping on. One of each pair we carefully unwrapped. The other went into our control group. We then rewrapped our newly unwrapped samples. We calculated the differences in film used between the two processes, which was pretty easy for the flow wrap.

ugly packaging vs. overwrap

Our film differential ranged from a low of 13% to a high 50%. Unfortunately we did not have printed film to replicate all of our samples but the film savings is clearly demonstrable.

We now have a sheet to show the film differential for each product.

For the shrink wrap comparison, we relied upon the visual of how unattractive and lumpy the shrink wrap looked. We know that shrink wrap uses more film because they cut if off in the factory but we don’t have the original film size before the cutting and shrinking. We also know that the heat tunnel for shrinking requires 60 amp service while our whole FA-ST overwrapper only requires 30 amp service. So we know there are some energy savings as well.

We took pictures of each product side by side for display purposes.

Now all that remains is seeing what response we get from Walmart’s vendors – our potential customers.

Off to Bentonville!!