Straw – a natural solution to cold chain shipping

“Something needs to change in how we treat our world,” says Markus Guderian, QIAGEN’s associate director of supply chain operations EMEA. Guderian has been looking after shipments for QIAGEN since 2001. “In the past, no one thought about how much plastic we used for packaging. Now, it is one of our key sustainability issues.”

Many of QIAGEN’s products must be kept at specific low temperatures throughout their journey. To guarantee this cold chain, the products are normally packed in Styrofoam. Styrofoam is an excellent, lightweight insulator. But it is also a form of plastic – polystyrene - made from fossil fuels. This plastic is non-biodegradable and non-recyclable. It is a standard sight in landfills and can take hundreds of years to decompose. 

“We started looking for alternatives to plastic packaging a few years ago,” says Guderian. “There are many firms innovating in this area, but we weren’t convinced they could meet our requirements. Then we came across Landpack. Theirs was the only concept that was really different.”

Natural temperature control

Instead of a plastic-based insulation, Landpack uses straw. The straw is pressed into panels, wrapped in a compostable covering and inserted in the packaging boxes.

“Straw not only has good insulation properties, it also absorbs shocks well and is moisture regulating,” says Thea Hintermeier, head of operations at Landpack. “And unlike hay, which is a source of food for animals, straw is a residual material that is available in abundance. Better still, after use it can be composted and returned to the soil or used to produce biogas, creating a natural cycle.”

Guderian and his colleagues were immediately interested in the solution, but also saw potential challenges. “My first worry was what would happen when our customers open the package in the lab. Labs operate under strict cleanliness and safety regulations. I imagined dust and dirt flying everywhere,” he says. “But I was proved wrong.”

Guderian invited Landpack to show him how they do it. “We developed our manufacturing process to comply with the rules for food packaging. These are the highest standards on the market,” says Landpack’s co-founder Patricia Eschenlohr. “The straw we use is supplied by contracted farmers who harvest, clean and store it according to our rules. We disinfect it and x-ray it to ensure there are no foreign bodies, and we check it meets microbiological thresholds. We use an AI-based system that automatically sends an alert if standards are not met.”

The Landpack boxes have been tested and validated to international standards. In addition, the company works with its customers to pre-qualify the packaging for each of their specific applications and transport distances.

Getting everyone onboard

“We were very impressed by what Landpack could offer,” says Guderian. “The next step was ensuring that Landpack’s product met the rigorous quality standards of our logistics partner, UPS Healthcare.”

UPS Healthcare is an expert in the safe shipping of medical products to worldwide destinations and has worked with QIAGEN for over a decade. “Medicines are often temperature sensitive. There are therefore tight regulations in every country we ship to around the type of packaging that can be used. We ensure those regulations are met and that the packages arrive with the customer in the right condition,” says Philip Ysebaert, Global Account Director at UPS Healthcare. Despite these considerations, Ysebaert and the UPS Healthcare team were open to exploring the new packaging concept as it fit well with his company’s own sustainability goals.

UPS Healthcare has a GDP-compliant healthcare distribution center in Roermond, the Netherlands, where Andy Cain is in charge of packaging decisions. Medical products from thousands of companies cross paths here. “We have to maintain the highest levels of cleanliness in the warehouse,” says Cain. “We cannot afford to allow anything that brings damp, dirt or mold into this environment. So straw is not the kind of packaging material we would normally see here.”

Together with UPS Healthcare, QIAGEN put the Landpack boxes through a series of tests to see if they maintained the right temperatures over the required period and whether handling the boxes resulted in dirt or dust in the environment. “We got feedback from our carriers to find out if anything unexpected happened during transportation,” says Cain. Guderian also sent samples to QIAGEN’s customers and asked for their views. “Once we saw that the responses were positive, we had the feeling we were on the right path,” he says.

Ready with answers

The biggest questions that emerged were around import restrictions. How would different countries treat the straw? What proof would they be required to provide that it contained no insects? Would there be a problem if it had been treated with pesticides? Landpack was ready for all the questions. “They had every certification we needed for shipping around the world,” says Guderian. “The only country where we hit a hurdle was Japan, but we are working on that.”

The result is that QIAGEN has now switched all its products that require a constant temperature of +5°C to Landpack boxes and is testing using dry ice in the straw packaging for products that require -20°C. Some conventional boxes are still needed for longer transports. To get products to Brazil, for example, requires 120 hours of cold chain. The straw boxes can currently guarantee 72 hours. “We are developing ideas of how to do this too,” says Guderian.

Replacing plastic packaging with a more sustainable alternative plays an important part in reducing the overall environmental impact of QIAGEN’s operations. It took a lot of searching and testing to find the right solution, but it was worth the effort and shows what partners can do when they work together. “Sustainability is on everyone’s agenda today,” says Guderian. “Just as we ask UPS Healthcare about how they are making warehousing and logistics more sustainable, so our customers ask us what we are doing. By exploring options together, we can make changes that significantly reduce the environmental impact not just of our business but the whole value chain.”