Over the years, BOBST has been committed to its industry vision of “Shaping the future of the packaging world,” with sustainability as one of the four pillars. This focus is now reaching a critical juncture for the entire industry.
We are less than a year away from 2025, which has been the target year for the many sustainability goals that hundreds of corporations and companies have committed to. This famously includes the Global Commitment, led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme, which united more than 500 organizations behind a common vision of a circular economy for plastics.
Much Progress but More to Do
There has been some fantastic progress. A recent assessment concluded that those companies who signed the commitment have significantly outperformed their peers in tackling plastic waste. However, many of those ambitious 2025 targets will be delayed.
On April 24, 2024, the European Parliament adopted the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which includes packaging reduction targets, restrictions on certain kinds of single-use packaging, and some reuse targets. PPWR also reiterates that all packaging placed on the European Union market must be recyclable.
At the drupa 2024 exhibition in May, organizers of the international expo in Germany named sustainability one of its two “megatrends,” along with digitalization. According to drupa, these two megatrends go hand in hand because “Industry 4.0 is the key to overall sustainable production in the print and packaging industry.”
Sustainability is a huge, multifaceted topic, without easy solutions. Each company—independently or teaming up with suppliers, customers, or peers—needs to identify where it can make the greatest strides forward.
BOBST joined the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2022, reinforcing our commitment to urgent climate action. We formalized the company’s targets and decarbonization options, not only for our operational activities—digitalization, automation, connectivity, and sustainability—but also for our impact upstream and downstream to reduce our carbon footprint. Now, our SBTi targets have been validated and confirmed to be in line with the goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as decreed in the Paris Agreement.
Optimizing Operations
Companies have the most direct control over their own operations, and this has been a major area of focus for BOBST in recent years. Our targets in this area are ambitious, including a 42% carbon reduction on our own operations by 2030, but that reflects the speed at which the world needs to decarbonize.
At the core of the BOBST business is its machines. We appreciate that packaging requires large, high-productivity machinery, designed to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which makes the environmental load of machinery in energy and material consumption a significant challenge.
We know that most carbon emissions occur downstream in the value chain, i.e., at our customers’ sites, where we have less leverage. But we believe we still have a responsibility to help our customers reduce those emissions. This is why we have given our teams a target of reducing energy consumption by 20% for the machines we will sell in 2030 versus our baseline of 2022.
Another major area of focus is enhancing the currently installed machines. We focus on enabling retrofits so our customers can upgrade previous BOBST machines with more recent developments; for example, adding automatic ECO mode on gravure machines can reduce energy consumption by up to 50% during standby.
Remanufacturing machines is a highly cost-effective and sustainable way to increase productivity. Old machines can see their lifetime doubled, while being rejuvenated with new electronics, more efficient motors, and the addition of software to enable features such as remote assistance.
Packaging Innovations
Then, there’s the actual packaging itself. This is the area where the eyes of the world really are upon us. As an industry, we have to lead the world into a new era of recyclable packaging.
Industry leaders have pioneered a range of innovative, environmentally improved packaging solutions. This has been a multiyear journey, which is reaching a critical and exciting point, when all of the collaboration and research and development are resulting in real, commercialized solutions on our supermarket shelves.
For example, BOBST’s oneBARRIER is a family of industrially viable recycle ready mono-material ultra-high and high-barrier duplex and triplex substrates for packaging designers as alternatives to nonrecyclable, metallized polyester film.
Now, we are expanding into new application types and new packaging models, while also expanding the ecosystem with new partners. There is no single “silver bullet” solution, which is why we need a “family” of solutions across all material types.
It is an example of how sustainability requires commitment, collaboration, and continuous innovation to enable real progress.
Collaboration is at the heart of it. Much can be achieved when multiple experts come together with a shared goal. Now, we are looking to build on the considerable progress that has been made, achieve our sustainability goals, and help our customers achieve theirs.
Sylvain Lieb is head of corporate sustainability at BOBST.