UFLEX ventured into sustainable packaging much ahead of its time. What was the motivation?
I think one of the motivations was that in the mid-90s, our chairman along with the board of the company then—UFlex was a much smaller company then—were always traveling for machinery because India was basically, in the mid-90s and early 2000s, fully dependent upon imported machinery for packaging manufacturing. During those travels, we saw a lot of machine suppliers had machinery being put up for the handling of plastic waste.
Coming from India, I think our chairman and the board had the foresight to understand that it would become a problem in India in the future because city municipal budgets are not equipped to handle the level of urbanisation.
Now, if you look at post-2005 as a benchmark, India’s story is basically about more and more urbanisation. The whole value-led model is that today, you have 65–70% of the population employed in agriculture. For India to become a middle-income country, that number will need to come down to about 40–45%. That means more people will move to cities, more consumption will happen, and more waste will be generated. This general theme has been pretty prevalent at the senior level, at least at our chairman and the board’s level, for a long time.
Finally, it boils down to consumers, and particularly in India now, we have this demographic dividend of a younger generation. How have you seen the awareness and the response changing over the years?
I think in terms of urban standards, the Indian people no longer want dirty cities or cities with poorly functioning waste management protocols. They can put up with other challenges, but in terms of living standards, you are asking young people to set up families and buy houses. Nobody wants to buy a house, which is an expensive asset to own and maintain, and then end up living in a city where you have extremely poor public hygiene or poor waste standards. I think there is almost zero tolerance in terms of the communities that will come, and the younger generation will not put up with the idea of dirty cities.
If you go back 15 years ago, the problem would not get fixed because you didn’t have enough technology. Now, private players are incentivised to set up technology. India can urbanise in a much healthier manner because the idea that you will urbanise now and clean it up later is not going to work.
What are the next frontiers to scale in sustainable packaging in terms of innovation?
Well, I think one of the first frontiers is basically to show the industry that the existing set of materials can be recycled. The idea that you have to change packaging design from the ground up and invent a whole new quantity of materials is misplaced. There are enough materials today that perform well in a cost-effective manner for packaging, which can be recycled and successfully put back into the value chain—either back into the food value chain or into organised articles of plastic where they don’t cause pollution, like injection-moulded furniture or parts which have recycled content in them. That would be the first and most important thing. Secondly, obviously, would be to not over-design packaging.
How do you compare the Indian packaging industry on sustainability factors vis-à-vis the global industry?
I would say the Indian industry is much faster than the global industry in trying initiatives or product ideas that are considered more sustainable. In the UK and Europe, it has been extremely slow to change materials or improve packaging standards. The only challenge is that the public utilities and recycling facilities at a state or city level are not really there today in terms of handling the waste.
