Last week, Edyta M. Niemczyk Niemczyk (Engineering Team Lead Keiryo Packaging Technologies) and I attended the Sustainable Packaging Summit, an event masterfully organized by Tim Sykes and his team at Packaging Europe.
More than 100 speakers shared their thoughts and insights, and there were many great interventions. However, in this post, I would like to focus on the opening statements, where keynote speakers shared their thoughts on the challenges ahead.
EUROPEN's Francesca Siciliano Stevens highlighted the energy cost crisis, which is putting the whole European packaging industry under huge cost pressure. Bruno Van Gompel observed that today, there is much less focus on sustainability than one year ago. Price trumps sustainability in most consumer purchasing decisions. The solution: 'Sustainability needs to bring a competitive advantage.'
At Keiryo Packaging Technologies, our goal from the onset has been to improve the sustainability of polymer-based packaging while reducing its manufacturing cost. How do we do we do this? Not with a new material or a recycling system but by developing a scalable processing technology that improves the performance of polymers
#performancefollowsmorphology. As I had the opportunity to explain it on the innovation stage, we have demonstrated that when used with commercial grade virgin and recycled PET and on standard machinery in the plant of our technology partner PDG, our technology improves the barrier and thermal performance of blown bottles. This will reduce the weight, hence the cost and carbon footprint of plastic bottles while maintaining the same performance level. With the Keiyo technology, sustainability will become a competitive advantage.
#performancefollowsmorphology.
