SÜDPACK publishes progress report for 2021/22

Sustainability is a central topic for SÜDPACK. Which is why sustainability reports that cover the company’s activities and investments in this topic have been published regularly since 2016. The film manufacturer has now once again voluntarily documented its progress in the areas of action of circular economy, climate protection and social responsibility in a current update for the 2021/2022 reporting period. For the first time, the latest progress report includes all six SÜDPACK production locations in Germany, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA.

SÜDPACK has already received multiple awards for its ambitious sustainability strategy. In WirtschaftsWoche’s cross-sector sustainability ranking, for example, the company group was among the top 50 of Germany’s most sustainable SMEs in both 2022 and 2023. The “100 Companies for Resource Efficiency” Initiative honored the company’s SPQ technology in 2022 for being pioneering in terms of both sustainability and print quality. In 2023, the film manufacturer received a prestigious special award during the Lean & Green Summit for “Excellent Strategic Implementation” based on its outstanding results from resource-efficient production operations. Two innovative products also won over the jury of the German Packaging Award this year – the Tubular Bag PurePE and the recyclable blister concept PharmaGuard® for solids applications.

The circular economy section of the progress report …

focuses on the latest generation of innovative material structures within the framework of SÜDPACK’s ZERO WASTE initiative. These structures equally fulfill the future requirements of the PPWR regarding recyclability, material efficiency and recyclate use – and are perfectly designed in terms of barrier functions, machinability for a wide variety of industry applications and customer needs. The implementation of an LCA tool, which can be used to develop new SÜDPACK products and for holistic life cycle assessments for customer-specific packaging concepts, is a major step in the right direction.

A further focus of action is chemical recycling, which SÜDPACK views as a viable, complementary technology to mechanical recycling and has been promoting with extensive investments since 2021. The long-term strategy aims to further expand the available capacities and, in the interests of a necessary circular economy, make packaging materials that are not currently recyclable circular and therefore sustainable. And at the same time at the German sites, mechanical material management is being consistently optimized and regranulation and compounding further expanded. SÜDPACK is currently the only film manufacturer on the market that has access to both these recycling options.

And when it comes to climate protection …

the company group is working hard on long-term CO₂ reduction on the basis of its NET ZERO vision in accordance with the SBTi, which SÜDPACK committed to in 2022. Since then, the CO₂ reduction pathways for scopes 1, 2 and 3 have been defined and submitted to the SBTi.

Significant progress in social responsibility …

has been made by SÜDPACK not only with SA8000 certification, which was initiated in 2022 and completed in 2023, but also mainly with projects for improving employee satisfaction and occupational safety. The company is currently focused on supplier evaluations in order to fulfill the requirements of the upcoming Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains (Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz, LkSG).

Focused on the future

The main features of the current report are aligned with the forthcoming Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that came into force on January 5, 2023, at EU-level and that all Member States must transpose into national law within 18 months. This will place sustainability reporting on the same level as financial reporting. Using the inside-out perspective (impact materiality) in the months ahead, SÜDPACK will ascertain the actual and potential positive and negative impacts its business operations have on various sustainability issues. With the outside-in perspective (financial materiality), the opportunities and risks of sustainability issues for the company’s financial situation as well as for the future viability of its business model are considered.