You were at FACHPACK 2024. What are your impressions of the trade fair?
We had considered beforehand whether we should really do it or not. I am very glad that we were there. It was very, very positive. We were able to make a lot of new contacts and met up with many acquaintances again. The discussions were very purposeful and informative, which I thought was very good.
Do the packaging manufacturers need you? Surely, they know the regulations in the individual countries?
They also always need updates from the various countries. They don’t have them in the combined form of an overview for the individual countries. There is also the issue of eco-modulation of license fees, as the more sustainable packaging solutions often have higher input costs. However, if they are more recyclable, then they can also cost less to dispose of, which means they can use this wonderfully to calculate business cases. But this is also a topic that is very, very new in the industry. Of course, companies can gather and calculate the data themselves as well. But our aim is to make all this data available to them.
Did you find a gap in the range at the right moment and fill it?
We had the right timing. We are four and a half years old as a company, we started before the Green Deal came along and since then the topic of recyclability has only become more relevant rather than less, which is of course very positive for us.
Where do you see yourself today?
We have almost 30 employees, software developers, but also specialists from the packaging industry. The mix is very, very cool. This still helps us today in really getting to the heart of the matter and to not develop software that isn’t usable afterwards or does not do justice to the complexity of the packaging industry. We have now run through over a million packages. You also need to know how to build something like this in a technologically scalable way. And, of course, it also has to be right from a business perspective, because only then can we achieve the impact we want to achieve.
Let’s talk about the team again. You have a mix of employees from different industries, but around a third of them are women. Your co-founders are a woman and a man. In your opinion, where do women stand in the packaging industry today?
It is still a male domain, according to a rough estimate the gender ratio is perhaps 70 to 30. But I have never had a problem with this and never felt that I was not taken seriously. It’s a pleasant and informal industry. There are now more and more women in management positions and many women who develop ideas and drive issues forward.
Your team deals with the conditions and regulations from various countries. Finding and putting them together is probably not an easy task.
We have to work on it and update it every day. One part is proactive, we have developed technical means for an efficient approach. And then we have built a network. That helps us a lot, of course; there are initiatives that we have been working with right from the start. Some of them have introduced us to a lot of contacts that we were then able to develop further for ourselves. However, we realizethat this also goes through our customers. So that’s actually very good, because it’s not the German start-up that’s knocking on the door, but also a few names that give us the status that we’re implementing this well. That has built up over the years.
How far along is digitalization regarding this?
Some data is incredibly difficult to find. The difficulty is always that many of the guidelines that we have to implement also leave room for interpretation. Because, of course, they are not intended to be digital, but instead specify rules in PDF files regarding incompatibilities, how they can be categorized and what is considered recyclable. And that’s really exciting because we often have to be very precise during implementation, for example, regarding the weight of the paint or the water solubility of the adhesive. So, every case really has to be considered. These things often are not clearly stated in the rules. We then put a lot of work into sitting down with the organizations and explaining our questions to them. Often, they can’t even answer them themselves because they haven’t considered certain questions. We then develop these aspects further together. That takes time, of course, but that’s how we make progress.
Background: Recyda, which stands for Recyclability Database, is a start-up founded by Vivian Loftin, Christian Knobloch, and Anna Zießow in 2019. They use software to compare the recyclability of packaging from more than 20 countries.
