EU Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius was interviewed by German daily Die Welt in January, in which he said banning plastic packaging would be ‘an important step’. “I would like to remind him,” began Nicolas Lorenz, Chief Commercial Officer at PACCOR and a Petcore Europe Director for PET Converters, “what the former Commission did.”
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Packaging done properly
PACCOR CCO Nicolas Lorenz
Addressing an audience of around 300 plastics industry delegates during the Petcore Europe Annual Conference in Brussels, Lorenz added that the EU’s vision for a circular plastic economy under the Juncker Commission mentioned nothing about ‘banning’ or ‘eliminating’. “They said when we have a vison for plastic packaging, we can generate growth – it’s very important to recognise this. They also had a clear way forward in turning a vison to reality.”
Here Lorenz was referring to the Juncker Commission’s desire to support innovations for easy recycling, and making EU-based recycling companies the global leaders through looking into opportunities in getting recycled materials back into markets.
“All of this was their idea and I was a big fan,” Lorenz admitted. “And let’s be clear – plastic packaging has proven that food is safe in plastic packaging. With no packaging, cucumbers save 80 tonnes of plastic a year, but cucumber waste increases.” This conundrum generated concern in the packaging industry – something Lorenz called the ‘Game of Packaging Thrones’.
Rather like the popular HBO TV series, the big-hitters – glass, aluminium, paper, and plastics – are all competing for superiority, and many attitudes along the value chain, according to Lorenz, remain in the realm of consumer-blaming and deflecting the problem. “We’ve made [consumers] part of the value chain,” Lorenz clarified. “The consumer buys goods for personal use … We have to ignore them in our thinking; we need other smart solutions. Take them out of the loop.”
Lorenz here called for industry players to ignore such consumer participation but added that the active consumer can still contribute through the key areas of digitalisation, marketing and communication. Simply put, packaging has to talk: “We need tools and data for immediate consumer interaction … As soon as we communicate that this is our commitment, they will appreciate it.”
Digital watermarks are one such solution. The Holy Grail project was developed to hide the watermark and make it work on all packaging surfaces. “Together with Digimarc,” Lorenz continued, “we have developed a digital watermark on a PET tray [with] 100 per cent detection. The complaint was that it doesn’t look nice – so we hid the watermark behind the logo and, all of a sudden, the tray was decorative and readable to sorting machines.”
Working together, and with the aim of taking full responsibility for materials – even after consumption – the PACCOR CCO invited everyone to join in and make it happen commercially. “Only what is openly available makes a change in this world,” was Lorenz’s closing remark, alongside his personal commitment of making PET trays recyclable in 2020. Nobody in the Commission, after all, is talking about banning multiple-use packaging.