When it started to see its packaging customers embrace the fledgling “sustainability trend,” converter Winterborne, Inc., took an old idea and made it the new darling of the warehouse/clubstore set. For its EnviroShell™ container and long-term eco-awareness plans that may just impact the world at large, Winterborne takes the 2007 Innovator Award for Sustainability.

Headquartered in Chatsworth, CA, vertically integrated Winterborne converts thermoformed plastics, corrugated and paperboard into a variety of two-piece clamshell blister packs, carded blisters, folding cartons, and countertop and floor point-of-purchase displays. Its client base—primarily consumer-durables makers—include such household names as Microsoft®, Toshiba, Samsung, LG Electronics, Seiko, Speedo and Leatherman. Along with the output from a partnership facility in Shenzhen, China, Winterborne's two plants in California produce the finished materials and provide contract-packaging services as well.

“More than two years ago, we started to see signs of the industry changing from an environmental standpoint,” recalls Howard Mallen, Winterborne executive vice president. “It began with the anti-PVC movement, as I would call it, which really was the start of the sustainable-packaging movement.”

For Winterborne, the evolution of the two-piece plastic clamshell or carded blister away from PVC to a more eco-friendly virgin PET, then to recycled-content PET blisters, was not enough. “We asked—from energy, water usage, greenhouse-gas emissions and materials recyclability—what is the best material we could use?” Mallen explains. “We decided fiber was the best if we received the paper from sustainable forestry.”

Having a trapped blister inside lightweight paperboard is not a new idea; converters have made all kinds of “foldover-blister cards” since the 1980s. Winterborne's innovation with the EnviroShell lies in its ability to mimic strong, all-plastic clamshells via different combinations of mini-flute corrugated and various weights of preprinted linerboards. The patent-pending EnviroShell uses a 100-percent post-consumer recycled PET blister sealed between two pieces of recycled corrugated. The components easily separate for disposal and recycling, and Winterborne claims the package is cost-neutral to traditional plastic clamshells.

For Big Box retailers, particularly the Wal-Marts, Sam's Clubs and Costcos, EnviroShell provides a self-selling package with bold graphics on a larger billboard than typical pegboard-mounted blisters. But like those packages, it passes theft-prevention requirements and also withstands the weight of being stacked three layers high in palletized POP displays.

During its development, sealing of the EnviroShell corrugated became the chief issue. “All the qualities that make corrugated the ideal material to replace the plastic created the challenges we had,” Mallen says. Hot-melt and cold glue had produced disastrous results in the past, but success came with a water-based, sustainable adhesive activated only by heat.

Winterborne cooperates with Hyannis, MA-based Sencorp, Inc. (www.sencorp-inc.com), to manufacture the HPFlex/EnviroShell sealing equipment. That system bonds the corrugated together while also crushing the outside edges to eliminate unsightly raw flutes.

The merits of EnviroShell were recognized last year as the package won a Best Sustainable Technology award at Packaging Strategies' Sustainable Packaging Forum in St. Paul, MN. Its success is further evident in the more than 2 million packages in the marketplace to date. Add to that the strategic alliance Winterborne established in late 2005 with Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s i2i™ business unit. That agreement has helped Winterborne gain new customers in new markets such as Johnson & Johnson and Neutrogena.

“For Smurfit-Stone, it was a very good deal because 90 percent of the package is corrugated,” says Winterborne president and chief executive officer Joseph Nazari. “They just renewed their license, and they have the right to sublicense [the EnviroShell] with our approval.”

Licensing the package is one of Winterborne's plans to help spread sustainable packaging worldwide. Five licenses already have been issued—three in the US and two in China—and interested European customers, as well as toymaker Mattel, have made contact. “We are creating a network so we can manage the quality of the EnviroShell,” Nazari says. “I'm not interested as much in issuing licenses as I am in keeping the quality intact.”

Meanwhile, at the Chatsworth plant, space for EnviroShell contract-packaging operations has been doubled and will expand again by early next year, Mallen says. “The RF sealing [for all-plastic clamshells] and shrinkwrap part of our business is getting smaller as we see EnviroShell getting larger. With Wal-Mart's Scorecard making every SKU's packaging traits accountable by next February, we're seeing more people becoming reactive and saying, 'We have to change.'”

Further evidence of EnviroShell's success is the converter's latest expansion of its “Take to Register” POP marketing program. Rather than putting high-ticket items such as iPods and media cards out in the open, product is secured in locked displays but promoted via representative packaging on the sales floor (See example above).

Five years down the road, Nazari predicts EnviroShell will be Winterborne's primary business as end-users move away from plastic clamshells. “Definitely, they have no other choice but to go with a sustainable package. Everyone needs to pay his share for saving the planet for the next generation.”