Avery Dennison is a global materials science company specializing in the design and manufacture of a wide variety of labeling and functional materials. The company’s products, which are used in nearly every major industry, including pressure-sensitive materials for labels and graphic applications; tapes and other bonding solutions for industrial, medical, and retail applications; tags, labels and embellishments for apparel; and radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions serving retail apparel and other markets. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the company employs more than 30,000 employees in more than 50 countries. Reported sales in 2019 were US$ 7.1 billion. Recently, we met with Pankaj Bhardwaj, vice president and general manager – India & SAARC, label & graphic materials, Avery Dennison, to know about the company’s advancement in intelligent labels and sustainability initiatives in India. Here is an excerpt from the interview.
Mahan Hazarika: Please tell us about what interesting is happening at Avery Dennison India.
Pankaj Bhardwaj: There are interesting things happening at our organization. There are a few directional themes that we are looking upon currently – first is what we term as intelligent labels where labels do more than simply dissipating passive information and adding aesthetic touch to products. So that is one direction wherein we are putting in a fair bit of energy into. The second important direction for us is sustainability. We are continuously working on bringing new solutions to the market which are more sustainable and look further to our commitment toward the society that we are living in. The third theme is, continually looking around the challenges that brand owners and customers are facing in the marketplace, and trying to solve them. We have a large R&D development setup in the country which is also clubbed with a knowledge center. This facility is dedicated towards developing new solutions befitting the need of the customers in India and nearby markets. While the first two initiatives are more about developing products, the third one is more about developing differentiated services which ultimately delivers better values to customers.
Mahan Hazarika: How are you ensuring that intelligent labels make things smarter for users?
Pankaj Bhardwaj: Intelligent labels or smart labels – labels inlaid with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology – are rapidly improving many aspects of how we live, from the clothes we wear and the food we eat to our cars, medicine, and air travel. As the world’s largest UHF RFID partner, Avery Dennison is at the forefront of this transformation, developing pioneering integrated RFID solutions designed to help improve inventory management and loss prevention across the value chain, from manufacturing source to consumer.
In intelligent labels, we ensure that we are able to deliver two unique propositions – the first being a better supply chain efficiency. So, we use RFID as the base technology for ensuring that the supply chain footprints are clearly visible, and one is able to manage its inventory, stock upkeep and fulfillment of the trade far better than what the current technologies are offering.
Second, we are using the same base technology through Near Field Communications (NFC) where a label with NFC is able to engage with consumers in a far more meaningful way, and is able to unlock values for brand owners by giving better information around customer, and giving customer far better information around products.
Mahan Hazarika: You have also launched your iLab at ADIKC. How is it adding value to the industry?
Pankaj Bhardwaj: Yes, in India we have recently launched iLab at The Avery Dennison Innovation and Knowledge Centre (ADIKC) so that the industry is able to use this infrastructure to understand intelligent labels and its technology better. The lab helps improve the awareness of the technology and get into the immersive experience of how the technology works. The center is up and running and we can already see that a good number of eco-system stakeholders are putting it to good use. Very clearly, we see a lot of interest of the retail companies, companies in logistics warehousing, and to a certain extent, beauty and personal care products exploring and using intelligent labels. We believe that it is at an inflection point where adoption is going to multiply every year. Even the government is a huge target market for RFID.
Mahan Hazarika: Tell us about the developments taking place at Avery Dennison India in the run-up to your 2025 Sustainability Goals.
Pankaj Bhardwaj: As we work toward our 2025 Sustainability Goals, in India we are making progress in all three directions – reduce, recycle and redesign. First on the reduce, we have got a series of products, wherein without compromising the product performance and quality, we are decreasing the amount of material used for that products. We ensure that these products meet the Avery Dennison ClearIntent Portfolio standards. The Avery Dennison ClearIntent Portfolio offers meaningful improvements in sustainability over other Avery Dennison products. I am glad to share that this year we have doubled the ClearIntent Portfolio over the last. This means, our offerings are significantly ramping up in ClearIntent.
We are continuously redesigning our products to have lesser carbon footprint as well as help recycling. For example, a large portfolio of our paper products today is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified. And it is more of an organization led initiative rather than customer or market led initiative. Almost 50% of the paper that we sell today is FSC certified and our goal is to become 100% FSC certified by 2025. We are continuously re-looking at how we can help circular economy advance from the recycling point of view. So we are designing new adhesive solutions which make separation of labels from bottles much easier and hence the recycling process. Our solution CleanFlake, which we are introducing to the market, makes separation of labels from polyester bottles much easier.
The third, recycling: we have taken the initiative early on to ensure that we are disposing whatever waste we generate very responsibly. At our factory, we have been landfill free for quite some time now. For the industry, for which waste management is a huge problem, we have rolled out two programs. These two programs are for liner recycling and matrix recycling. These projects were extremely difficult to get going initially, but I am happy that we have been able to crack it and now we have tied up with the industry association to ensure that we are creating awareness around these two programs.
We are able to facilitate the pickup of the liner waste from brand owners’ sites and send it to our designated paper mills who are able to recycle it to make industrial tissues. A lot of brand owners have already signed up for this program. The second one is matrix recycling which has been the biggest problem of the industry. Now we have a program wherein the matrix can be either picked up by a recycling center or transported by converters themselves to a recycling center where it can be either used for generating energy or used for re-polymerization. Both of these programs have come up in the last one year.