An inside view of an industry quietly being reshaped by a ceiling fan company's packaging change; why smaller changes with quantifiable impacts matter so much now
Oltao’s designer chandelier fan with retractable blades adds elegance and energy efficiency to a modern living room — blending smart lighting with sustainable design.
Other industries misuse sustainability these days; it is a word that floats freely around, often without a tangible goal in mind. But with Oltao, an upmarket Indian ceiling fan brand, a commitment to go green was much too important to be confined to words. Their last-green decision to shift packaging from thermocol to moulded pulp provides a fertile ground to study what concrete progress in environmentalism could really mean-worked out technically and numerically.
Oltao decided to evaluate the packaging impact of its most popular product-a 52-inch designer ceiling fan-with a life-cycle analysis instrument. At first, it looked like the move might be one of compromises. Moulded pulp packaging probably did something worse by weighing the package seven percent more than the thermocol counterpart. But the numbers came, and another story was told.
Although weight went up, total carbon emissions per shipped fan went down by eleven percent. This came mainly because the moulded pulp was biodegradable and recyclable as opposed to the EPS being non-biodegradable. Far more impressive even was the ninety-eight percent reduction in landfill volume. The cardboard comes from a plant located only about two hundred and fifty kilometers away, and it will enter the paper recycling stream in Rajasthan within six weeks. These changes taken individually may seem insignificant, but they are the beginnings of a quiet and measurable, scalable evolution.
Notwithstanding this being a small shift from Oltao's perspective, it does show how these small changes within manufacturing industries could cause ripple effects. Once the brand proves that they are willing and able to do eco-friendly work, and that they are efficient at it, other brands follow suit. There are over twenty manufacturers of fans in India that still use imported EPS inserts-unless all of them start following Oltao’s footsteps, the huge emission and waste reduction potential would certainly mark a significant advancement for the entire industry.