Crown Holdings Q&A: Increasing Circularity in Packaging
Each year, around seven million tonnes of aluminium goes to landfill.
This aluminium took energy to mine, refine, smelt and shape – which all goes to waste.
Crown Holdings is a global company that designs, manufactures and sells packaging for various products to companies in more than 40 companies around the world.
This includes aluminium packaging, like beverage cans.
Sandrine Duquerroy-Delesalle is the Sustainability and External Affairs Director at Crown Holdings, in charge of the implementation of its global sustainability programme Twentyby30.
She has more than 20 years of professional experience in managing business developments and driving change to tackle sustainability and circular economy challenges.
Sandrine shares her insights with Sustainability Magazine.
Why are you passionate about sustainability?
We have a big challenge regarding climate change, biodiversity loss and waste in general in our societies and we need to tackle that. As a producer of packaging, we have a chance to have a material that is circular in itself by design.
We want to let our customers and consumers, who don't always know, about the sustainability credentials of aluminium. That's something I'm really passionate about. Aluminium is a great material, I think it's growing a lot. It's used in many applications, including packaging.
Sustainability for me is very important because we are seeing the impact of climate change more and more, and we know about the impact of our societies, so we need to try and decrease this impact.
What is Crown doing to improve recycling rates?
Recycling rates really differ from one region to the next.
I'll focus first on Europe. In Europe we've had packaging regulations for a long time, the first packaging regulation in Europe dates from 1994 but we're still not there. If you look at the recycling rates for all types of packaging, it's still too low. I think the new packaging regulation that was just completed in Europe will really boost recycling and also make all packaging recyclable, which was not the case.
If we talk about the US, where we can see that our cans are not being collected and recycled, there is no extended producer responsibility. Some states in the US are actually looking at new bills to implement EPR and some states have what we call “bottle bills”. So deposit return schemes, but not very ambitious – like 5-10 cents. When you look at Germany, it's 25 cents on a can or bottle.
I think regulations really have a role to play to also ensure that all companies put packaging on the market so they play with the same cards. When you have EPR, everybody pays their fair share of the collection system and the recycling system.
How does collaboration tie in with your sustainability strategy?
We are a member of a number of trade associations across the world. In these forums, we work with our peers on advocacy, projects, and communication.
We are also part of an alliance, which is called the Global Beverage Circularity Alliance. There are 10 companies in this alliance, including some of our aluminium suppliers. The idea with this alliance was also to have a more global outreach.
What advice would you give to companies looking to improve their circularity strategy?
Collaboration is very important. When we are talking circularity, it's not just us, it's the entire value chain that needs to collaborate – especially in aluminium.
We have primary aluminium, then we have casting and rolling, then we make the cans, our customers buy it and it's being consumed. If we want to ensure that circularity is working, it's all members of this value chain that need to work together.
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