Cold Chain Sustainability
- Refrigerated shipments consume a tremendous amount of packaging that may be difficult, or even impossible, to recycle. And in the mission to ensure quality, many shippers overpack boxes due to the difficulty or expense of tracking temperatures during shipment.
- If a shipment is out of an acceptable temperature range by even a single data point, the entire truckload may be rejected. The result is a significant amount of waste: $50 billion in pharmaceuticals and $409 billion in food shipments are discarded every year due to failure to maintain temperature during shipment.
- Challenges with measuring and maintaining temperature during the shipping process result in wasted time. Which means wasted money, wasted fuel, and other limited resources.
The key to solving these challenges, and achieving greater sustainability, is Varcode’s SmartTag™. These innovative barcodes utilize technology that causes the barcode to shift dynamically as the temperature changes within the shipping container, providing cumulative temperature-time exposure at a range of time intervals. It can also tell when the shipment has gone outside of an acceptable temperature range for a predetermined period of time. Your SmartTag™ can tell a story each time it’s scanned.
The cold chain shipping industry faces some unique challenges related to sustainability.
The result: data that can both guarantee deliverability and improve your organization’s environmental impact.
- Stop overpacking your shipments! With the data harvested from SmartTag™ deployment, you’ll know how much packing material you really need – and if you can make the switch to more sustainable packaging.
- Reduce the waste of lost truckloads with SmartTag™ data. By giving your cold chain shipping professionals actionable intelligence during a shipment, you can both impact your bottom line and reduce wasted shipments.
- Save time, save the environment. When you can make quicker decisions with SmartTag™ data, you won’t just get your shipment to its destination faster – you’ll keep people and vehicles from sitting idle, which can help reduce your carbon footprint.
Varcode is committed to corporate sustainability. All of our products are fully recyclable. And we’re striving to help other companies transition away from traditional insulated packaging to more sustainable insulation packing materials.
