Leading environmental compliance data specialist Ecoveritas will be represented at next month's Environmental Packaging Summit by Chief Strategy Officer, Andrew McCaffery.
The two-day event, held at the Eastside Rooms, Birmingham's newest conference venue, on 13-14 June, aims to bring together packaging professionals from across the supply chain to talk about Extended Producer Responsibility, Deposit Return Schemes, and the very latest in sustainable innovation.
McCaffery will sit alongside Claire Shrewsbury, Director of Insights & Innovation at WRAP, Steve Morgan, Head of Policy and Infrastructure at Recoup Recycling, Robbie Staniforth, Innovation and Policy Director at Ecosurety, and Mike Baxter, External Affairs Director at BERRY bpi group, for a panel session on Extended Producer Responsibility chaired by Packaging News editor Phil Chadwick.
"The Environmental Packaging Summit has very quickly become a bellwether for both packaging professionals and brands alike," said McCaffery. "This year's event takes place at a seminal moment for the sector. It will, no doubt, help mobilise stakeholders with the ideas and agency to facilitate the ongoing transition.
"The unpalatable fact is that the UK still produces too much waste, and we don't recycle enough. The summit will allow leaders and key thinkers to focus on challenges requiring absolute collaboration.
"For sustainability to be a truly commercial priority for corporations, legislation must incentivise sustainable choices and de-incentivise unsustainable ones. Governments worldwide have begun stepping up, enacting recycling claim standards, packaging bans and EPR laws. Progress is slow, but it's gaining momentum."
McCaffery, having previously worked as Director of Consulting at one of the UK largest compliance schemes and within his role there was the Project Director for DEFRA/WRAP Packaging Flow Projects, developing early-stage EPR models and consulting with industry on EPR and Deposit Return Schemes (DRS), has extensive expertise in global Extended Producer Responsibility legislation, covering all aspects of packaging, batteries, waste electricals and textiles, legislative design, and compliance.
"Transformation is a constant for modern business," he added. "Today, it can no longer be discussed without environmental action. If you want to reshape your business for the future, you must prepare for a business landscape that will aggressively deal with climate change and its impacts.
"Sustainability legislation is rapidly multiplying across the world in terms of scale and complexity. Extended Producer Responsibility reforms, plastic packaging bans, plastic packaging taxes, recycling incentives and other schemes can stack up to create an impossibly complex packaging puzzle for some applications – but no matter how bewildering, multi-faceted, and obscure this puzzle gets, we must continue to articulate how data almost always holds the solution."
With the packaging industry at the centre of the sustainability debate, the Packaging News event represents a platform to discuss the latest innovations and services, explore pressing sustainability issues, and learn from industry leaders.
The 50-minute session involving McCaffery is scheduled to take place on June 14 at 14:10, with tickets on sale now
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