Wetropa editorial team
Packaging - think green!
HESSIAN SUSTAINABILITY DAY
Low-emission packaging also reduces emissions throughout the supply chain
Author: Lina Ebbinghaus, September 17, 2020
Can packaging be sustainable, especially if it is made of plastic? Yes, says Dirk Breitkreuz, CEO of Wetropa Group. The Darmstadt Chamber of Commerce and Industry participated in the Hessian Sustainability Day on September 10, 2020, and invited the packaging specialist from Mörfelden to give a virtual presentation on forward-looking packaging solutions.
Wetropa is the first foam processing company that is itself climate-neutral and offers climate-neutral products. In his presentation, Dirk Breitkreuz gave an insight into his company's sustainability strategy and showed how sustainability and innovative capability can interact and how to successfully integrate both into the core business. Wetropa always develops its products in close exchange with its customers. That customers would follow suit in the attempt to make packaging more sustainable was not certain at first. "Buyers are very price-sensitive and novel packaging solutions are often initially expensive to develop. So we were very excited that the buyers we work with were fully on board with developing more sustainable packaging," Dirk Breitkreuz said in his presentation.
"The packaging has real added value not only for us, but especially for customers - especially when you think about logistics, starting with storage space and ending with emissions during transport." Low-emission packaging reduces emissions throughout the supply chain. As the entrepreneur vividly illustrated with an example, this alone can save a lot by reducing the volume of packaging. Not only do fewer resources need to be used to produce the packaging, the costs for storage and transport can also be significantly reduced.
Plastics are often better than their reputation when taking a closer look at their life cycle and often perform better than paper and cardboard in terms of emission intensity during production. Following the presentation, the participants in the virtual session discussed in particular how not only to integrate shareholders such as suppliers and customers, but also how to improve cooperation with disposal companies. This is because there is still a great deal of development potential, particularly with regard to the recyclability of plastic packaging, starting with material innovations and extending to sorting and recycling.
The Hessian Sustainability Day is a statewide day of action that was organized this year for the sixth year in a row. With more than 850 events and activities, sustainability became a tangible experience throughout Hesse. Municipalities, clubs, associations, schools, institutions, companies and many people took part and showed how they are committed. A compass of activities is available here.
To the article on the IHK Darmstadt homepage