As the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) gains momentum, there’s a clear divide between those who are ready and those who aren’t. The latter are often smaller organizations that don’t have the scale, resources, and/or internal expertise to navigate what is fast becoming one of our industry’s most complex challenges.
As a key part of this value chain, we want to share our in-house expertise to give clarity to those who need it. Here we’ve gathered the key takeaways from our recent podcast with Packaging Europe, featuring Emilie Bartolini, our Government Affairs Lead for Europe, and Alena Maran, our Director for Strategy and Sustainability in Label and Packaging Materials for Europe.
Q1: You're both relatively new in your current roles. What was it like to take responsibility for regulatory affairs and sustainability, just as everything went into flux?
Alena: When I joined Avery Dennison’s sustainability team, my number one priority was to map out the upcoming regulatory changes. I wanted to pinpoint how regulation and sustainability commitments impact brands and packaging companies.
Shortly after I met Emilie, we locked ourselves in a meeting room, set up a whiteboard, and tried to develop scenarios around how we saw the future potentially changing, and whether that change was going to be accelerated or whether we would see more gradual transitions.
We place sustainability at the core of everything we do, so the question we were supposed to answer was: how do we prioritize and how do we create clarity in this sustainability maze?
Emilie: The fact that we were at the beginning of a long process to establish our government affairs function added a layer of complexity. We knew we wanted to engage with the Brussels audience, but we needed to identify the key external partners we should work with to achieve our government affairs goals. At the same time, I was tasked with working internally, primarily with Alena's team, to define our priorities.
In the midst of all of that, PPWR hit like a tsunami, accelerating the process. So there we were, locked in a room trying to figure out how to prepare the company for the uncertain road ahead.
Q2. What have you've learned so far about the implications of PPWR for the value chain and what do all players need to consider when planning their approach?
Alena: Step one is to understand how PPWR impacts your product portfolio. It doesn't matter where in the value chain you play, whether you're a packaging producer or whether you’re producing a packaging element, like labels.
There are a lot of moving parts in the regulatory process but the underlying objective is clear: packaging must be recyclable, and it must use fewer virgin materials. So, with those two objectives in mind, we need to ensure that every element can support packaging recycling, uses recycled content, and can support new business models, such as reuse.
