Can Manufacturers Institute joins 2023 Asia CanTech lineup
L-R: Robert Budway and Scott Breen
Robert Budway, president, and Scott Breen, vice president of sustainability, at the Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI), have been announced as the first keynote speakers joining Asia CanTech’s 2023 edition in Bangkok, Thailand. Alex Rivers spoke to both about their involvement in the conference
Scott, it’s been over two years since your speaker slot at our virtual Asia CanTech back in November 2020. What are you most looking forward to at the 2023 in-person event?
Breen: I’m very much looking forward to engaging directly with can makers, fillers, and their suppliers in Asia and around the world, on the sustainability issues that are becoming increasingly important globally; things like recycled content, decarbonisation and recycling rates.
Zoom meetings are great, but if you want to really get ‘in the weeds,’ in-person back and forth dialogues are best.
I’d say the other reason it’s important for us to be there is that we’re working hard to build off our Global Aluminum Can Sustainability Summit last year that we organised with the sponsorship of Ardagh Metal Packaging and Crown Holdings. That summit was focused on decarbonisation and on standardisation of how we measure recycled content.
It’s important that we engage with can makers around the world on these issues because they’re global in scale, and there are learnings we can exchange with each other. We’re all grappling with these issues and asking how do we reach young consumers and consumers in general that are demanding sustainable packaging.
Robert, you are joining us for the first time. What is of key importance for CMI’s attendance at the conference?
Budway: Asia has experienced and will continue to experience significant economic growth for decades to come. I remember former President Obama, I think it was in 2012 or 2013, saying in a speech in Asia that it’s an amazing place because that part of the world is less consumed by conflict, and people are instead more focused on trying to make their lives better for themselves and their families. Asia should be a model for other parts of the world trying to achieve high economic growth.
On the other hand, pollution in Asia is an enormous problem. Eight out of the nine rivers in Asia have the highest plastic pollution among all rivers in the world. Half of the world’s carbon emissions come from Asia, and a significant portion of that comes from China. So, the metal can should play an important role in helping protect the environment by replacing other more harmful packaging, while still providing an essential packaging solution for food and beverages.
Could you give us a preview of what your presentations will cover?
Breen: What’s great about this presentation is that we’re going to be touching on all the metal can sectors, because we’re working in all of them: aluminium beverage cans, steel food cans, and aerosol cans.
We are working on numerous exciting sustainability initiatives. With aluminium beverage cans, since I last presented at the virtual Asia CanTech in 2020, we’ve really honed our strategy to raise recycling rates in the United States. We’ve published ambitious targets, as well as an aluminium beverage can recycling primer and roadmap that details how we got to the leading position as most recycled beverage container the United States, and how we’re going to achieve the new heights we’ve set for ourselves. I’m going to explain in the keynote the activities we’ve taken so far in our four pillars of action, and then our plans for the future.
I also plan to touch on our efforts regarding the focus areas of the Global Aluminum Can Sustainability Summit: decarbonisation and recycled content measurement standardisation.
With steel food cans, I’m going to provide information on our successful Canned Good marketing campaign, that my colleague, Sherrie Rosenblatt, leads, which highlights the infinite recyclability of the steel in food cans, and the food waste reduction that steel cans enable.
With aerosol cans, my focus is going to be on talking about our two 2030 goals we have in our Aerosol Recycling Initiative that we are co-leading with the Household and Commercial Products Association (HCPA). I’ll explain what we’ve done in the first year of the initiative, and our plans for the next phase of it.
Budway: The main point I want to cover is that the food, beverage and general line can industries in Asia really need to unite around messaging to the consumer that the metal can, due it to its permanent material status, should have a more prominent presence in the portfolios of consumer goods companies, and consumers need to buy and recycle cans to the greatest extent possible.
This is hard but essential work that the global can industry must undertake in coordination among countries and regions.
This message will help the industry’s growth, along with tackling pollution and environmental issues that are affecting not only that part of the world, but globally. We are not going to be the only solution, but we can help alleviate further environmental damage in terms of carbon emissions and pollution by encouraging consumers to move away from single-use materials and opt for the permanent, recyclable solution of metal cans.
What, in your opinion, is the biggest hurdle in improving recycling rates worldwide?
Breen: I think the biggest hurdle is that we do not have the right policies in place to get aluminium beverage cans collected and recycled that are in the home and away from home. We’re very clear in our Aluminium Beverage Can Recycling Primer and Roadmap, that what can lead to the most amount of progress toward the ambitious recycling rate targets we’ve set, is new recycling refund (i.e. deposit return system) programmes. Policies like this have successfully raised aluminium beverage can recycling rates to significantly high levels around the world.
Ten states in the US have a deposit or recycling refund, as we like to call it. Currently, in the US, with those programmes in place, when you sell an aluminium beverage can with a deposit, there’s a 77 per cent recycling rate for those cans. But when you sell one without a deposit in the US, data tells us that there’s only a 36 per cent recycling rate. The difference is stark between deposit and non-deposit cans when it comes to the end of life.
We’ve made a concerted effort alongside the Aluminum Association here in the United States, to push for new recycling refund programmes. In my keynote at Asia CanTech, I’m going to go into the coordinated advocacy effort that we’ve engaged in, both in the lessons learned and the successes.
Budway: Based on the US experience, again, it’s about messaging to the consumer. We must instill the ethic that you have to place recyclables in the recycling receptacles. Data from the Recycling Partnership shows that only 59 per cent of US households have access to curbside recycling – many of those households may be recycling incorrectly, inconsistently, or not at all.
Also – I’ve seen this, and you’ve seen this too – in public parks, people throw their trash in the recycling bin, and throw their cans in the trash. The bins are often right next to each other, but the action the consumers take must be clearer.
What I really want to get across in Bangkok in October is that as an industry, we need global messaging; to talk about the need for recycling and decarbonisation to consumers and to educate them about the benefits of permanent materials like steel and aluminium.
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