On 25 of July, a new webinar for the preparation of the European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR) 2023 took place, focusing on businesses and on their projects.
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Held on 25 July 2023 the second webinar for the preparation of the European Week for Waste Reduction 2023 titled “Sustainability and packaging: your own business can make the difference!”, in which were given the floor to companies, to their actions and future developments.
Did you miss the webinar? Click here to see it on youtube.
EWWR, which this year will take place from 18 to 26 November 2023 and has as its theme the reduction of packaging, represents a real international call to action that promotes concrete movements for the reuse of goods and packaging and for the prevention and recycling of waste. The SERR in fact, is a campaign that grows from below (grass grow), annexing to itself the actions of citizens, schools, companies, and public bodies, coordinated through a national committee composed of different actors and public institutions such as the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security.
The webinar promoted by CONAI (Consorzio Nazionale Imballaggi), collected different speeches worth to be told.
Roberto Cavallo, CEO of ERICA (cooperative engaged for over 20 years in the fields of Education, Research, Information, and Environmental Communication) and one of the founders of EWWR in Italy, defined waste as: “the narration of a faulty manufacturing process”. With regard to this edition he stressed that the theme of packaging’s reduction should not be a limit, but a starting point, and that this is the first edition in which companies play a leading role as they are directly involved in the design and marketing of packaging
UTILITALIA, a national committee member representing companies since the first edition of this campaign, stressed the importance of involving them. In fact, they can intervene in every phase of a product's life cycle, especially in the packaging needed - from its design to its end of life.
On behalf of CONAI, two consortia took part, Comieco - Consorzio Nazionale Recupero e Riciclo degli Imballaggi a base Cellulosica, and Ricrea - Consorzio Nazionale Riciclo e Recupero degli Imballaggi in Acciaio.
Federica Bruman from Comieco’s research and development department, supports companies in choosing packaging with a lower environmental impact, and in the management of the end-of-life of the packaging itself. During her speech she presented some examples of paper and cardboard eco-design packaging that were awarded by Conai through the annual call. According to the recent concept of ecodesign, packaging can define itself as eco if it respects some principles like the possibility of being recycled or reutilized but also the ease with which you can separate its different parts in the case they belong to different waste types, for example, multilayer packaging. Also, Luca Mattoni from Ricrea has highlighted the criticality of multilayer packaging because they are composed of two or more materials that can’t actually be recycled.
The webinar also gathered the testimonials of some companies including Movopack, an innovative start-up that deals with reusable packaging. The basic idea is to extend the life of the packaging itself by not binding it to a single use. In particular, Movopack focused on packaging that covers large household appliances during transport. The majority of these in fact consists of polystyrene which in addition to being less easily recyclable is in some cases also not very protective of the content it carries. The solution proposed by Movopack is an expanded propylene packaging that can be reused up to 15 times: after each use, it can be compacted into a single block the size of a briefcase, returned to Movopack for sanitation and re-use. This circular logistics system is certainly innovative and well-suited to the world of e-commerce.
In a context where 1.5 billion tons of waste is exclusively due to packaging, representing 35% of municipal solid waste, initiatives of this kind towards greater environmental sustainability are very important.
Diana Cima
Read also the previous article about the first SERR's webinar
Watch also the first SERR's webinar