After nearly two years of extensive research and stakeholder engagement, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) publicly released its Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework Version 1.0, designed to help companies measure progress toward the SPC definition of sustainable packaging.
The Metrics Framework provides a wide-ranging palette of indicators that are organized into eight categories related to material use, energy use, water use, material health, clean production and transport, cost and performance, community impact and worker impact. Each Framework module explains why the measurements are relevant to sustainability efforts, defines each indicator as it relates to packaging, specifies the metric to be used and provides recommendations for what to measure.
   
The technical document was jointly developed by a group of stakeholders representing leadership companies throughout the packaging supply chain in response to concerns about the proliferation of individual company sustainable packaging metrics and scorecards. The Framework can be downloaded at www.sustainablepackaging.org.