SPC Advance 2020

There has never been a more important opportunity for companies to take a leadership role in serving our society. We’re overwhelmed with worry about the economy, health and the environment, we increasingly believe our “system” isn’t working, and our expectation that companies take a stand for solving our societal and environmental ills is steadily increasing. Suzanne Shelton will unpack her firm’s latest insights work — pre-COVID and during COVID — to help the audience see what people want and need from Corporate America, and how companies should be positioning themselves and communicating in order to create a market advantage now and in the future.

After celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and experiencing the largest global health crisis in decades, environmental action through collaboration has become more important than ever. Executives around the world are discovering new ways to lead in the fight against climate change – including, powerfully, with data. Much of this work depends on our focus on CO2 reduction, supply chain improvements, and sustainable packaging. Qlik will discuss data-driven strategies currently taking place around the globe. They’ll also present a model your business can use to increase sustainability while saving money.

Time to visit the Networking Lounge; organize 1:1 Meetings with fellow attendees & access private messaging.

The Virtual Exhibition Lounge will also be open for you to explore each fully immersive 3D exhibit booth, experience live chats and scheduled meet-ups, discover the next great innovation, and dive into available resources.

Take a tour of an actual paper mill and learn how sustainable, fiber-based packaging is produced from tree to roll!

Time to visit the Networking Lounge; organize 1:1 Meetings with fellow attendees & access private messaging.

The Virtual Exhibition Lounge will also be open for you to explore each fully immersive 3D exhibit booth, experience live chats and scheduled meet-ups, discover the next great innovation, and dive into available resources.

This live, remote presentation, hosted by the Recycling Education Center of Sims Municipal Recycling, will include photos, videos and graphics describing the recycling process in New York City and beyond. Additionally, it will showcase operations at Sims Municipal Recycling, the largest Materials Recovery Facility in the country where each day 1,000 tons of New York City’s residential recycling is received, sorted and prepared for sale. A Q and A section will also be offered.

Polypropylene packaging is one of the most versatile packaging materials on the planet. Join The Recycling Partnership and the Polypropylene Recycling Coalition’s lead funders to understand how targeted investment will drive better recycling access for polypropylene and better recycled content feedstock for the brands and retailers.

Welcome to the GP virtual forest tour! Join us for this 360° experience to learn more about the forests that provide the wood-based products we all depend on. The forest is a dynamic, ever changing, resource and during this experience you will be able to see first-hand the steps we are taking to help maintain healthy forests now and into the future. We look forward to taking a virtual walk in the forest and showing you around.

The HolyGrail 2.0 will be presented and discussed throughout the lenses of different value chain stakeholders. As this will be a virtual event, a video compilation from previous Open Houses will be shared to showcase the equipment. An update and next steps will be provided by the Platform EU Association leading HolyGrail 2.0 (AIM, The European Brands Association as being the initiative facilitator) and P&G.

From carryout bags to trash can liners to construction film, Revolution’s focus is using as much post-consumer resin in all the plastic film products they make. Take a tour and learn more about what goes in to making those products and how sustainability is a key part of the future.

Join us for a Virtual Tour and Presentation of Cedar Grove’s Everett Facility, one of the largest commercial composting facilities in the country. Processing collected organic materials from Snohomish, King and Pierce counties, Cedar Grove’s two facilities process more than 350,000 tons annually, creating OMRI-certified, organic compost that is available in bulk and bags at Cedar Grove locations, Home Depot, Lowes, Fred Meyer and independent retailers across the Puget Sound region. As a pioneer in the collection and processing of compostable packaging, Cedar Grove will provide a glimpse into industry best practices and why information and innovation matters.

What if there was an easy-to-use tool that provided your company greater insights into the sustainability of the forests where they source fiber for paper and packaging? Forests in Focus, released earlier this year, is built on data from the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA), NatureServe and others to assess risk at a landscape-level. Using this approach, Forests in Focus allows users to see where conservation efforts are most needed, ask the right questions of their suppliers about their fiber supply, and gain the confidence they require to meet responsible sourcing goals.

Kelly Cramer, lead of the How2Recycle program, will lead a panel on Targeting the Tube, exploring how the plastic tube could be an emblem for multiple packaging formats. In this session attendees will learn more about the research and recent packaging innovation to increase recyclability of tubes as well as the changes needed in collection, sortation, and recovery to enable a path to recyclability.

Grocery retailers contribute to 40% of food waste coming from consumer-facing businesses in the US, an estimated 18.2 billion dollar opportunity. As grocery stores expand their selection of prepared and hot foods, more customers dining on-premise also means more post-consumer food scraps, a new and rapidly expanding waste stream for many retailers.We’ll discuss best practices for reducing both pre-consumer and post-consumer food waste in the grocery retail environment, and for diverting food waste from landfills with the help of composting programs. Innovations in packaging that prevent spoilage, standardized date labeling, and discounted imperfect produce can drive down costs and engage consumers in food waste prevention. We’ll also look at how compostable packaging can be used to capture more food scraps from customers dining in-store.This session will arm you with the tools to successfully manage one of our most important wasted resources.

Technologies that can transform plastic packaging back into virgin-like plastics and other upstream materials will likely need a partnership from incumbent petrochemical companies to grow and scale. These partnerships and offtake agreements are key to finding investors and ensuring that we can return plastic waste into material supply chains. Petrochemical companies are just beginning to demonstrate their commitments to more circular supply chains. This session will explore how these partnerships are getting done, through case examples. Participants will discuss: how they’ve collaborated on technology development and process/pre-process improvements, how much investment/alignment was needed to execute the partnership, and what the potential is for technology and a new source of feedstock to make its way into the traditional plastics supply chain.

This session will include a two-part presentation by SPC and Sealed Air, featuring their work on sustainable e-commerce packaging. The SPC will set the stage with a level-setting presentation based on our recently launched Essentials of Ecommerce Packaging course. In the second part of the session, Sealed Air will share findings from their consumer research on perceptions of sustainable packaging in e-commerce and how this impacts customer experience.

Time to visit the Networking Lounge; organize 1:1 Meetings with fellow attendees & access private messaging.

The Virtual Exhibition Lounge will also be open for you to explore each fully immersive 3D exhibit booth, experience live chats and scheduled meet-ups, discover the next great innovation, and dive into available resources.

A number of high profile reusable packaging solutions and programs have been deployed in the last year. In this session leading groups at the forefront of these initiatives will discuss the learnings, challenges, consumers’ acceptance and what in their perspective, will be the tipping point for mainstream implementation.

New developments in technology – from manufacturing to business intelligence – have spurned new innovations and advances in how paper packaging is sourced, manufactured, collected, and better aligned with principles of the circular economy. Shifting market dynamics in the United States and across the globe have played a role in triggering these advances leading to new investments and perspectives of what is possible with fiber-based packaging.

Building off of the prior session ‘How e-commerce is reshaping customer experience and driving sustainability’, this session will open up the topic for discussion among participants in an informal, roundtable conversation, focusing in on consumer experience and sustainability in e-commerce packaging. What has improved in e-commerce packaging from a sustainability perspective and do customers see this improvement? Where is there still room for improvement? How might we better engage consumers around sustainability in E-commerce Packaging?

Pre-registration is required to join this session

Is a Perfect Storm Brewing for Paper Recycling’s Success Story?

While the use of recycled fiber continues to increase in many paper packaging formats, it originally derives from virgin fiber pulp production. At this particular time when covid-19 is creating unique industry challenges, could the confluence of global megatrends and long-term changes in patterns of consumption, undermine the sustainability of the very pulp mills that create those virgin fibers? In so doing, could they undermine the inarguable success of paper recycling and recycling rates?

Dr. Paul Fowler, Principal, Diligentia Consulting

Molecular Recycling: Challenges and Solutions

Chemical recycling in the context of plastic waste is receiving an increasing level of interest as a means to recycling plastics that do not work with mechanical recycling. Chemical (or molecular) recycling enables plastics that have little commercial value to be effectively converted back to their chemical components and re-used to create new plastics and other feedstocks. The process to do this, however, is not easy with challenges ranging from feedstock and offtake agreements, to permitting, to developing an economically viable technology to enable the conversion. However, solutions to the many challenges facing companies entering this market do exist and are continuously evolving. Some of these challenges and the approaches to addressing them are the topic of this presentation.

Jeff Gold, Founder and CEO, Nexus Fuels

An Emerging Leadership Agenda for Safe & Circular Packaging

Consumer concerns with food packaging including persistent pollution, waste, and toxins signal a potential disruption that will require rapid innovation in the food packaging sector. At the same time, new, previously approved, chemicals are showing up on regulatory agendas weekly. How does the supply chain stay ahead of this rapidly changing consumer landscape, minimize future risk, and avoid regrettable substitutions? A leadership agenda is emerging for companies who have adopted sustainability and circular economy goals, who are actively searching for safer materials, and who recognize the need to go beyond regulations to excel beyond the current challenges. This session will build the case for safe chemistry as a foundation for compostability, recyclability, and the circular economy and propose an agenda for companies who wish to lead in the transition to a safe and circular future.

Stacy Glass, Executive Director, ChemFORWARD

This presentation will explore emerging innovations in carbon utilization and removal technologies that offer opportunities to transform CO2 in the air into sustainable materials that can sequester carbon.

Effective monitoring of our agricultural lands is a key component in the fight for global food security and a shared global challenge that can only be addressed through international collaboration across countries, organizations, and sectors. To help address this challenge, NASA Harvest was launched in 2017 as NASA’s Applied Sciences Food Security and Agriculture Program. Its overall goal is to enable and advance the adoption of satellite Earth observations by public and private organizations to benefit food security and agriculture in the US and worldwide. It is a stakeholder-driven program, motivated by the fact that more timely and accurate agricultural information as enabled by EO data and technologies could significantly enhance key agricultural decisions, whether by humanitarian organizations, governments, industry, or farmers. This talk will provide an overview of the NASA Harvest program and will highlight examples of its work and impact across the agricultural markets, humanitarian and private sector domains.

Learn about CompostNow’s closed loop approach to implementing successful compost programs and how compostable packaging and serviceware play a part in that. Blair Lewis, Commercial Growth Lead, Compost Now

Time to visit the Networking Lounge; organize 1:1 Meetings with fellow attendees & access private messaging.

The Virtual Exhibition Lounge will also be open for you to explore each fully immersive 3D exhibit booth, experience live chats and scheduled meet-ups, discover the next great innovation, and dive into available resources.