EarthShift announces a new online course to help packaging professionals innovate and reduce the environmental impacts of their designs. The course, Sustainability in Package Design, was co-developed with Professor Rafael Auras from the leading School of Packaging at Michigan State University. The course, first being offered June 2 and 5, is designed to give packaging engineers, packaging managers and sustainability engineers tools they can use to design and evaluate more sustainable packaging, including an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) theory and hands on experience. The course will provide step by step techniques for identifying ways to reduce the environmental impacts of their packaging using PackageSmart, a user-friendly software program.

“This course is the first of its kind,” says Shelly Martin, EarthShift’s assistant training manager who developed the course with Professor Auras. “We believe this course will be a real enabler for sustainable design in packaging,” says Lise Laurin, founder and director of EarthShift. “It takes Professor Auras’ years of knowledge and distills the essence into an easily digestible course for busy professionals.”

“We have been using streamlined LCA software like PackageSmart to design and evaluate the environmental footprint of packaging systems for many years in our undergraduate and graduate classes.” explains Auras. “From these students’ and corporate students’ insights, we have designed this concise, results driven course. I think any packaging engineer will be able to walk away and make real improvements in their designs after taking this course.”

Life Cycle Assessment helps designers select environmentally preferable materials, which is critically important for attaining improved environmental performance of their package. It’s also a key to increasing innovation. Students will have the opportunity to apply this knowledge through a simplified LCA tool called PackageSmart. They’ll come away with the ability to model the full life cycle of their packaging, a set of steps to use to make improvements, and the ability to assess the extent of the improvements. Students will get a one-month subscription to PackageSmart as part of their course tuition.

The six-hour online course is split into two three-hour classes and also includes one hour of one-on-one time with the instructor so that each student can individually get answers to questions and further help with applying LCA to their packaging design project.

For more information on the course or to sign up, visit www.earthshift.com/training/sustainability-package-design or email [email protected]