Companies that worry about their carbon footprint should add “packaging” to their list of areas to work on.

Packaging, to many, may seem an afterthought, but there is a ton of work that goes into packaging, and pushing it in more of a green direction may not be that difficult a sell:

Consider the challenge of creating the packaging for Pop’n'Fresh dough. The mathematics involved in creating an airtight tube that will pop open easily when tapped against a hard surface — but not so easily that it will open prematurely in a refrigerator — would stagger many a rocket scientist. Even designing a cardboard box for shipping a refrigerator involves extremely complex calculations of “axial compression strength,” formsboard options, paper grades, and post thicknesses to keep the refrigerator free from dents and scratches during shipment.

The point is that since packaging is already a sophisticated science, the time has come to apply a greater proportion of engineering ingenuity to ecoeffective packaging. If we can optimize the axial compression strength of a refrigerator carton, surely we can reimagine the design, materials, and production processes to optimize for eco-effectiveness — throughout the product lifecycle, across the supply chain.

Check out the entire excerpt from Dave Douglas’s new book, “Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering,”on GreenBiz.com.