The Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE) has joined the European Pact for Sustainable Industry. In this interview, Annick Carpentier, Director General at The Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment shares the industry federation’s efforts to scale up sustainability impact on the ground.

The von der Leyen’s Commission is moving forward to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. What are the short-term and long-term challenges your sector is facing amidst Europe’s digital and green transition?

Annick Carpentier: Packaging is part of our daily life, and our way of living has changed over the decades. Packaging has and continues to offer essential functionalities: protecting food and beverages, allowing their safe use and transport, and preventing food wastage.

Packaging contributes to the resilience of food systems by allowing the safe transport, use, and storage of food and beverages, allowing a long-shelf-life, and by doing so reducing food waste.

The beverage carton industry believes that packaging can, and should, contribute to mitigating the biggest global challenge: climate change, while not compromising on food safety. The last months and years have shown how critical these two challenges are.

Beverage cartons are a recyclable low carbon packaging solution today and as such, contribute to a variety of societal and environmental objectives. Building on these assets, ACE’s members have adopted an ambitious vision for 2030 and beyond: we will deliver the most sustainable packaging for resilient food supply systems which is renewable, climate positive, and circular. Our industry has adopted ambitious commitments to ensure its vision becomes reality.

To help us achieve our ambitions, we will need an enabling EU policy framework to support our investments in innovation over the next decade.

We believe legislation should be outcome-based – that is to set enforceable, material, and technology-neutral targets and objectives but not ban or restrict access to the market from the start. Industry’s innovation capacity should be given some time to comply with clear, tangible, and non-discriminatory criteria.

• Legislation should provide enabling conditions which are predictable and clear for the industry to innovate and invest.

• The Internal market should not be undermined through diverging national measures as this undermines the efficiency of the industry in providing innovative and fit-for-purpose products across the Union.

• Legislation should be mutually supportive – specifically, we believe that the climate mitigation objectives and the circularity objectives should be mutually supportive and not be seen in isolation.

We know very well that only by working together we can tackle these challenges.

ACE Beverage Carton has launched its sustainability strategy in 2021.  How is the strategy/action plan contributing to reaching Europe’s climate neutrality?

Annick Carpentier: Our industry’s vision for 2030 and beyond is to deliver the most sustainable packaging for resilient food supply systems which is renewable, climate positive, and circular.  To become climate positive means achieving a state of net negative emissions by reducing and physically removing more greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere than the whole value chain emits, regardless of business growth.

In line with the vision of ACE members, every beverage carton will be:

• Made only from renewable and/or recyclable material.

• Fully recyclable and recycled.

• Made entirely from sustainably sourced raw materials.

• The packaging solution with the lowest carbon footprint.

We also commit to collecting 90% of beverage cartons for recycling and achieving a 70% recycling rate, verified by third parties. Other commitments include an annually reviewed Design for Recycling Guideline, using less plastic and more fibers.

The beverage carton industry has invested significantly across Europe to support the collection and recycling of used beverage cartons and will continue to do so. For example, Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc, and Elopak have invested ~8 million EUR in the Palurec recycling plant in Germany. In Poland, Stora Enso and Tetra Pak have invested EUR 29.1 million in used beverage carton recycling.

Which types of partnership are you actively seeking to enhance collaborations and ensure the uptake of the roadmap from your member companies?  

Annick Carpentier: We believe that working at the sectoral level does allow pre-competitive actions. We are all interdependent and can only achieve significant results by working together to improve the sustainability of our products.

At ACE we cover part of the value chain with the board suppliers and the beverage carton converters. Our members are actively working with value chain partners and customers to further ensure that we walk the talk. We are open to partnering with other trade associations and EU stakeholders to develop metrics and as appropriate, support our reporting that is directly linked to our commitments. The future requires collaboration and vision.   

How is your sustainability strategy influencing the dialogue with the Commission? What are the top 3 EU policy priorities are you engaging on?

Annick Carpentier: Our Roadmap was launched in March this year and we are proud that it was well-received by EU policymakers. We are optimistic that the upcoming policies that the Commission will deliver on the Sustainable Products Initiative, Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, or Food Contact Materials Regulation are all interlinked and can truly bring about a much-needed nudge so that the EU moves closer to its European Green Deal goals and provides a predictable, material and technology-neutral enabling framework for industry to innovate. We will actively support these efforts by engaging openly and constructively in a transparent dialogue with EU policymakers and finding solutions together.

For more information:

Contact Michel Hublet

Senior Director

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