How Blockchain Technology is Helping Berry Drive Circularity Through Increased Traceability, Transparency

Name: Berry Global, Inc.
Address: 101 Oakley Street, Evansville, Indiana, 47710
Telephone: +1 (877) 662-3779
Price range: £000 - £0000000

August 03, 2023

Many of our customers have set ambitious sustainability goals to use 100% reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025. While our global footprint and leading purchasing scale offers unique access to the supply of high-quality recycled material, customers need auditable and documentable records to prove products and packaging are sustainable.

That’s where GreenToken comes in. GreenToken is SAP’s flagship mass-balance management system focused on driving viable solutions for commingled, hard-to-trace raw materials. This blockchain technology makes the production and circulation of sustainable materials easier to verify and certify, thus allowing us to provide customers with greater insight into their product supply chains – all the way to origin stages.

GreenToken leverages the three innovative principles of mass balance, tokenization, and blockchain for chain of custody to increase supply chain traceability, transparency, and secure data exchange between organizations. Based on our secured access to recycled plastics, Berry contacted SAP to learn more about GreenToken, recognizing the need for an enterprise resource planning solution to help track and manage advanced recycled materials. As production with certified advanced recycled plastics scales, a tracking mechanism can help improve efficiency and organization across our host of B Circular Range packaging and product solutions and significantly increase the likelihood that materials used in products are sustainably sourced, child labor free, and ethically traded.

In order to verify and review GreenToken’s ability to enable traceability and transparency of materials across the chemical and plastics supply chain, we participated in SAP’s collaborative pilot along with six other organizations. The pilot successfully demonstrated the solution’s efficacy in being both industry-agnostic and successful for various types of material flows in global supply chain networks.

Through GreenToken, Berry and other participating organizations can create tokens that serve as a digital twin of the material flow of the bio- and circular chemical feedstock throughout the entire supply chain. The sustainability credentials encapsulated in the tokens are passable between business partners via blockchain as the material moves along the supply chain.

This capability significantly increases the likelihood that important ESG attributes are preserved, providing verifiable records Berry and our customers need to prove products and packaging are “sustainable,” according to industry recognized product standards. Verification and certification of sustainable materials are fundamental to establishing trust in systems, which is a necessary ingredient in propelling viable circular solutions forward.

“Accelerating the circular economy requires driving demand for circular plastics,” said Diane Marret, Sustainability Director, Consumer Packaging North America at Berry Global. “Integrating mass balance accounted materials into GreenToken’s centralized, global IT system helps reduce risk in our reporting accuracy, minimize manual efforts through automation, and build confidence and trust in our ability to manage circular materials.”

GreenToken will likely play an important role in continued efforts to support the transparency customers need and expect as they advance their ambitious sustainability goals.

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