The AIP Australasian Packaging Conference 2025 and Beyond kicked off with keynote speakers delivering a strong message around the need to balance the scale between reducing unnecessary packaging but maintaining its ability to reduce food waste.
The conference, held on 28 and 29 March, saw industry leaders share their insights and exchange ideas on how to better align with the upcoming 2025 targets for sustainability. Some 280 delegates gathered to hear from 70 speakers across the two days.
In case you missed the event, the PKN Podcast team conducted livestream interviews with speakers and delegates at the conference, you can find links to the interviews here.
Jason Fields, president of the AIP, opened with a warm welcome and asked the participants to take the opportunity to learn from each other and to network, stating that it has been the first time to meet face to face for a long time. He played a short video from sponsor Aleks Lajovic, MD of Impact International, that showed that for each participant who attended, a native tree has been planted along the bank of Five Mile Creek, just outside of Canberra at Impact's carbon offset forest. This will improve soil retention, reduce flooding and droughts, and provide shelter for native wildlife.
Pierre Pienaar, president of the World Packaging Organisation (WPO) made an impassioned speech on our collective desire to preserve the planet for our future generations. “It’s not about us, it’s about the generations to follow,” he emphasised. Pienaar joked that throughout his extensive travels around the world, people always want to take him to dumpsites. But the reality of that was that he gained much insight into the peril we are all in.
His insight from this was that EPR is the most effective tool in combatting plastic waste. He noted that 70 per cent of all packaging could be converted to mono-material right now, the technology already exists. He said we should not focus on the remaining 30 per cent, because 70 per cent will make a significant change to the current waste situation.
Nerida Kelton, vice president of WPO reinforced much of Pienaar’s opening message, while explaining that the WPO has three main goals, which are reducing food waste, reducing packaging waste and reducing problematic materials. Kelton said that what is important to remember, is that there must be a balance struck between packaging which can effectively protect the products inside, while also reducing the unnecessary materials that can make them up. This, she said, should be done through designing with these three prerogatives in mind.
Gian De Belder, technical director of Procter & Gamble, greeted us online from Belgium, where he had stayed up until 1:30am to talk to the gathering about technological developments the company has been making in streamlining recyclability of materials in Europe, the digital watermark initiative called Holy Grail.
Digital watermarks are invisible to the naked eye but are embedded into either the design on a product, or directly into the material itself, and allow a camera to scan them upon entering a recycling facility so it can be more effectively sorted into the appropriate stream.
While this technology is currently in its testing phase, it is expected to be rolled out in France in 2024 with 30-50 units set up in recycling centres to test how well it can cope with large volumes of waste in real time. As France has particularly aggressive waste-reduction targets, this technology is expected to accelerate movement towards them.
In the two days of interesting and thought-provoking discussions that followed, a very strong message around the need for collaboration emerged, with presenters and delegates of one mind that innovation, and infrastructure development required calls for a united industry effort across the value chain.
The next print issue of PKN will bring in-depth coverage of the conference.
