Positive feedback after Scanpack Summit: “Essential for the industry”

The premiere of Scanpack Summit has drawn praise from the participants. One of them is Daniel Morera, Partner and COO of Spanish Brainvestigations. “I truly believe that this type of event is essential for the industry”, he says.

Scanpack Summit, a one-day conference aimed at decision makers, was arranged during the opening day of Scanpack 2022. The conference focused on visionary and strategic issues for the packaging industry. Catarina Rolfsdotter-Jansson was the moderator and is extremely pleased with how the summit went.

“The overall impression is extremely positive. We had a very strong programme, with a broad range of participants who contributed different experiences and viewpoints.”

As an example she mentions Märtha Rehnberg, the visionary co-founder of DareDisrupt.

“She was incredibly inspirational in the way she expressed her views on disruption, in other words cutting-edge change processes, and the importance of ‘technological intuition’.”

Design for refill instead of recycling

Annette Lendal, a circular economy expert from the consultancy firm Lab21st, also opened the eyes of many in attendance. She encouraged the audience to focus more on design for refill systems and thus minimise the need to create new packaging.

“She highlighted very clearly the importance of taking action at an early stage of the process to ensure that we don’t even end up in a recycling phase. The message was that we, in other words human beings, are the weak link. Even though we have high expectations regarding our ability to recycle, we’re simply not very good at it. We must therefore eliminate the need for recycling to the greatest extent possible and instead focus on design for refill”, Catarina explains.

“Naturally this is a tough message to send to an audience consisting of people who work on creating packaging solutions. But she explained that there is also a value in new systems.”

Major ambition within the EU

Other speakers, such as Armando Mariano from Seda International and Alexis Van Maercke from APEAL, the Association of European Producers of Steel for Packaging, addressed the current policy situation regarding sustainability and packaging waste from their perspectives.

“Much depends on what is happening within the EU, and it was very exciting to hear that so many new initiatives are in the pipeline. There is a major ambition to achieve real and positive change, but the situation is also very complicated.”

The day concluded with a future-oriented panel discussion involving Alex Henriksen, Managing Director Tetra Pak North Europe, Maja Kjellberg, Packaging Development Leader at IKEA, Mike Baxter, External Affairs Director at Berry Global, and Mona Arnold, Principal Scientist at Finnish VTT Technical Research.

“There was consensus among the panel members regarding the need for continued dialogue and the importance of this type of summit”, Catarina Rolfsdotter-Jansson says.

This view is also shared by Daniel Morera, Partner and Chief Operating Officer of Spanish Brainvestigations, who studies the human brain to see how we cognitively react to packaging and what triggers our desire to purchase. His seminar on how we can create and test better packaging to attract consumers was one of the highlights of this year’s Scanpack Summit.

Daniel followed the entire conference.

“I definitely believe that this type of event is very important and valuable for the packaging industry and related services. The presentations at Scanpack Summit were of consistently high quality and provided the audience with useful and thought-provoking insights.”

He emphasises the need to meet in this type of forum:

“It is important to increase the level of knowledge within the sector as a whole with regard to innovations and best practice and, not least, sustainability in relation to industrial state of the art.”

Facts

About the Scanpack Summit
A strategically oriented conference with an international outlook, the Scanpack Summit brings together top-level decision-makers in both the packaging industry and politics. The Scanpack Summit is part of Scanpack, the key packaging trade fair in northern Europe.