Dear employees, esteemed business partners and customers!

In recent years, we as a company have been increasingly confronted with the negative image that plastic has. This has been driven by public debate which is conducted highly emotionally and often with only modest analysis of the problem. This is not a basis upon which real-world problems can be identified and resolved. I therefore see it as our responsibility to combat this widely held negative attitude towards plastic packaging with facts. After all, plastic has had a positive impact in many ways over the past 60 years and has played a key part in us as a society being able to continuously develop.

The advantages which are still applicable today are factually undeniable – high strength, good formability, stability, low weight and therefore also a reduced carbon footprint are just a few of them. When it comes to the real problems which still exist, there are effective countermeasures that can be introduced.

Closing cycles is the top priority

The most important thing is ultimately that packaging should not end up in the environment. But how can we at ALPLA ensure that plastic is recognised as a valuable resource and remains within the cycle for as long as possible? There are two areas at ALPLA that play an especially important role here – design for recycling and the expansion of our own recycling activities. ‘Design for recycling’ is all about how we can optimise our products to make their manufacture as resource-conserving as possible and, as the next step, to make them 100 per cent recyclable. We therefore have our sights set on the entire life cycle as early as at the product development stage – always with the aim of keeping all of the product within the cycle for as long as possible.

We are consequently also pushing for plastic packaging to be collected and recycled via waste collection systems at the end of its life cycle. Here too, we are building on our many years of experience, are operating a number of our own recycling plants and will be investing around 50 million euros a year in expanding our recycling activities between now and 2025. We are also looking into alternative, bio-based materials. Among other things, we introduced the first entirely home-compostable coffee capsule to the market under the brand name Blue Circle in mid-2021.

A responsibility towards society

I believe that ALPLA as a company has a responsibility towards society to guarantee reliable supplies to the global population in the future too. Our goal is to guarantee secure, affordable and sustainable consumption for the earth’s 10 billion inhabitants in 2050. This goal cannot be achieved without plastic. It is therefore all the more important that information be given on the basis of facts and that everyone all along the value chain is shown that each and every one of us can and must make an important contribution. It is essential that plastic be seen as a recyclable material with many advantages which we can’t imagine living without in the long term.