How we’re building our business and our sustainability solutions in 2022

In sports, teams refer to certain seasons as a “building” or “reloading” year. These are the years in which they quietly and diligently hone their fundamentals, fine-tune their playbooks, and cement relationships among players—all key steps toward eventually winning big. Building years are the years when teams hunker down and do the necessary work.

For LGM in the EMENA region, 2022 is another building block in terms of sustainability—both in our own operations and in the solutions we’re inventing to make packaging not just sustainable, but, ultimately, regenerative.

We’re hard at work putting the pieces in place to achieve the 2030 sustainability goals that Avery Dennison set for itself last year. This is a year in which we are heads-down, applying everything we know—and a few things we don’t yet know—toward reaching our goals and enabling our customers to reach theirs.

There’s steady progress everywhere I look. We continually roll out innovative materials that enable converters and brands to make packaging recyclable, employ recycled and renewable materials, and source responsibly. We’re continuing to win new customers for AD Circular, our digital application that enables brands to easily and cost-effectively recycle label liners. And we’re identifying new ways to reduce our GHG emissions as part of Avery Dennison’s ambition to be net-zero as a company by 2050.

Something we’re especially excited about is the potential for our Intelligent Labels platform to help businesses reduce waste and increase efficiency across the supply chain. Intelligent Labels can make an especially significant impact in the food segment, where waste is a costly problem and a moral issue. They can also help brands in many segments better engage consumers by sharing more detailed sustainability information and providing specific guidance on how to reuse or recycle packaging. 

We’re in a strong position to make a difference with our Intelligent Label solutions because of our presence in so many industries, and because we offer it all—a complete solution, what I call the “trifecta triangle,” consisting of the digital technology,  the material that bridges the physical item with digital capabilities, and the software capability in atma.io, the cloud platform that pulls it all together by giving every item a unique digital identity and tracking, sorting and managing all events over the course of the product’s life. 

The potential of our IL platform to change both business and consumer engagement and behavior for the better is enormous. But it won’t happen overnight. We have to roll up our sleeves and provide the use cases for  brands, retailers and consumers of the benefits, one conversation, one presentation, one pilot project at a time. We have to align our solutions with our market access to cultivate relationships with customers both current and new, and demonstrate, use-case to use-case, what our solutions can do. 

That’s what we’re doing this year. It’s another building block. But this is how you increase momentum. This is how we win. 

One of the things I like best about our Intelligent Label solutions is how we are driving new kinds of collaboration within Avery Dennison—across regions, disciplines, and business units. Just as Intelligent Labels represent a convergence of physical and digital information systems, our Intelligent Labels platform is the impetus for a similar convergence among our people. As  we build our momentum over the course of 2022, it is our people—their ingenuity, their dedication, and their capacity for collaboration—who make me confident we are building towards a big win.

The pandemic revealed the spirit and capabilities of our people time and again. Now, as Europe moves from one kind of unpredictability to another, it is good to be surrounded by teammates we can count on. 

Is 2022 an evolutionary or revolutionary year for you? I’d love to hear about it.