Southgate Global Shares Insight at Leading Environmental Summit

Our CEO, Dan Brasier, was invited to talk at the UK’s only sustainable packaging event, where he shared his expertise and insights on the packaging sector, particularly how it relates to tertiary packaging.

Now in its sixth year, the Environmental Packaging Summit hosted by Packaging News brings together experts from leading industry associations, major brands, manufacturers and logistics operators from across the supply chain.

The two-day event, which took place at the Park Plaza Victoria London, marked a major opportunity to share sustainability innovations in the sector and discuss crucial topics such as net-zero challenges, e-commerce packaging and waste management.

Speaking on the panel ‘Visions for Sustainability’, where major brand leaders discussed and debated key trends in the sector, Dan stressed the importance of taking small, realistic steps to help the industry meet circular economy targets and highlighted the need for backing up bold sustainable claims with concrete and meaningful action.

He said: “Each year products are introduced to the market to offer new sustainable alternatives. While it’s great to see innovation in the sector and new trends developing, not all products brought to market are a real step towards a greener future. Unfortunately, organisations are often guilty of branding their products as green to gain commercial advantage.

“The future of our planet cannot become a plaything to be used in opportunistic marketing campaigns. Instead, organisations should be focusing on sweating the small stuff whilst framing all this within longer but meaningful commitments and actions – not just goals.”

Dan acknowledges that such pledges are key, having recently hit targets at Southgate including partnering with One Carbon World to reduce and rebalance our greenhouse gases – securing neutrality for scopes 1 and 2.

Yet he argued what is equally as important is to focus on the changes that can be made in the present, such as helping customers repair rather than replace equipment.

Dan said: “Everyone in this industry needs to be leading the way for sustainability. We need to be moving away from making grand gestures and instead thinking harder about how we can action change now.

“A simple way of doing so is by repairing and renovating material handling equipment rather than replacing. Turning back things like damaged carts and trolleys that would previously go to landfill into perfectly useable equipment with a extended service-able life. We repaired over 145,000 of these last year. A significant carbon saving over and above any CapEx benefit. It is approaches like these that can make major differences and that include incentives for everyone.

“Small changes and different thinking can soon amount to big results in terms of sustainability, and as we work together with others in the industry, we hope to see more organisations taking this stance.”