GROWING FROM THE CORE: 1970-2000
In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a landmark law that helped push recycling efforts into overdrive.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, many larger legacy companies began to seriously revamp the materials going into their products, rethink the ways they managed waste and take a harder look at their carbon footprint.
Recycling initiatives started shaping public perception of companies. The sustainability battle cry of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” (invented in 1970 by University of Southern California senior Gary Anders) permeated culture.
For Sonoco, recycling was neither a new idea nor a fad. Long before recycling took its place in the public eye, we’d been probing different opportunities to reduce waste and reuse materials across our businesses, simply because it made sense.
“We were sustainable before sustainability was cool,” says CEO Howard Coker. “We were making paper in the ’50s out of old recycled materials.”
Former CEO Harris DeLoach agrees: “We’ve been recycling people from the beginning of time.”
Harris remembers a moment before he became CEO when he asked a Sonoco client if he could bag groceries for a day in one of their California stores. That, of course, was unheard of—but as California was on the cutting edge of recycling at the time, he wanted firsthand experience.
A day of bagging convinced Harris that being successful in the bag business meant Sonoco had to develop the first in-store recycling program. “It was very expensive,” he says. “But it was the right thing to do from an environmental standpoint. It was the right thing to do from a business standpoint.”
The question “How do we recycle?” naturally overlaps with “How do we derive the most value from every product?”
Even our founder, Major James Lide Coker, knew a thing or two about recycling. Having overcome the challenge of making pulp and finding new ways to use the pulp of the southern pine trees in his backyard beyond paper and newsprint. The solution—producing paper cones for the textile industry.
President of Global Paper Products James Harrell knows that Sonoco’s vast experience with paper means that we’re built for the future. “I think there’s a wonderful thing going on right now, and that is paper is making a resurgence,” he says. “We can recycle it multiple, multiple times. … That creates a nice runway for the next 15 or 20 years.”
For us, recycling has long been and will continue to be second nature to Better Packaging. Better Life.