Dunnage tonnage

Designers whose companies and customers are among the growing number now insisting on a recycling-conscious supply chain can be confident when specifying Texas Instruments devices. TI is committed to environmental issues related to its own packing and sharing best practices with customers, suppliers and competitors to promote industry-wide waste reduction.

"In the new world, you understand the total logistics of product movement and you go reengineer it with less material, not more," says Dan Wikander, Manager of Automotive Electronics, Just-In-Time Systems & Logistics for TI's Semiconductor Group.

Three factors are driving the new environmental emphasis on how parts are packed. Increasingly, customers want their entire supply chain to support their environmental initiatives and are choosing vendors based on conformance. The cost of disposing of dunnage has become prohibitive. Finally, as the cost of materials goes up, strategic reuse of materials is becoming a bottom line issue -- waste reduction can save money, resulting in more competitive pricing and lower cost for customers.

"Purchasing people are beginning to care about this kind of thing because the amount of dunnage affects their ability to dispose of it and their freight costs," says Mike Hastings, Packing Commodity Manager for TI's Semiconductor Group, "It's something they are having to pay an extra charge to get rid of, so they are starting to pay attention to what is being specified along the supply chain. We're trying to minimize the handling to make it more user-friendly."

TI's Packing Commodity Team (PCT) has developed reuse programs for intermediate containers (those that contain the chip itself). Intermediate containers, such as bags, now come in more efficient shapes. Standardized shipping boxes are taking hold in semiconductor shipping and in other industries, as well. And the tonnage that used to be dunnage (the filler inside the boxes) has shrunk.

Two of the PCT's goals are: to reduce the ratio of packing materials to product weight and to boost the percentage of packing that is reusable and recyclable. Improvements include:

• Changing magazine end-pins from nylon to PVC. By eliminating two dissimilar materials (the magazines are PVC), tubes can be recycled as a total unit. Previously, end-pins had to be removed by hand before recycling. Simple as it sounds, the redesign took a year. The PVC had to be strengthened to match the durability of nylon. A process for extruding PVC into the required shape also had to be developed. This industry-wide initiative will result in the recycling of 10 million tubes a year.

• Enhanced low-profile tubes for 300 mil and 600 mil DIP integrated circuits. New ELP 300 and ELP 600 tubes use 30 percent less plastic. Parts fit better, reducing freight and materials. Because of this industry-wide improvement, the tonnage, or total weight, of tubes going to landfills or being recycled will be pared by nearly one-third.

• Tape and reel tray packs. One tray fits all in a new TI-developed tray pack that replaces tape-and-reel pizza boxes. The new octag-onal box eliminates dunnage, is 70 percent lighter, uses 70 percent less material and stores 33 percent more product.

• "Jitpack." Working backward, from the shipping level to the part, TI is sharing this packaging, developed initially for the auto electronics industry, with other semiconductor companies.

• Multifunctional recyclable paper tape. The new tape functions as quality and security stamp, TI and ESD (electrostatic sensitive parts) identifier and packing seal, replacing multiple stickers. "The typical shipping container used to look like a bag going to Australia -- it could easily have a dozen identification things on it," says Hastings.

• Stepped-up recycling efforts. These include buying back trays and reels and using them as many as four times instead of just once. Carbon-linings in boxes and bags, which are recyclable, have replaced aluminum linings.

Through reduction, reuse and recycling, TI saved one customer -- Ford Motor Company -- 56,000 pounds of waste reduction from packing materials in 1994, according to Wikander. He projects an even greater savings, 92,000 pounds, in 1995. As a result, TI will reach its goal of providing 99 percent reuseable and/or recycleable packing materials and dunnage for its automotive customers.

"We're finding out that, by coming together with our customers and competitors on this issue, we not only have better defined their requirements for packing materials," says Wikander, "we have actually improved the quality of our packaging."

March 1995, vol. 12, no.2

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