Avery Dennison joins CELAB consortium

Currently only 52 percent of matrix and liner waste is recycled globally. CELAB is catalyzing a unified effort to accelerate matrix and liner recycling industry-wide to create greater circularity for labeling products. This aligns to Avery Dennison’s sustainability commitments to address waste, including 2025 targets to ensure its operations will be 95percent landfill-free, 75 percent of the company’s waste is repurposed, and that the company helps customers reduce the waste from Avery Dennison products by 70 percent.

‘Collaboration is at the heart of our sustainability vision. This marks our first industry-wide effort to work together and we're learning a lot. In a competitive environment, this isn’t always easy, but CELAB is the embodiment of how shared goals can reach across an entire value chain to push the industry forward towards circularity,’ said Renae Kezar, senior director and global leader for sustainability of label and graphic materials at Avery Dennison.

Avery Dennison’s participation, as a founding steering committee member, is part of the company’s strategic commitments to circularity, to launch products that promote recycling, and also take responsibility for the waste generated as a result of manufacturing labels, including waste by customers and the end users.

‘Our commitment to forming CELAB further underscores the complementary efforts, we are undertaking throughout our global operations to reduce our environmental impacts and engage in and influence sustainable, circular practices throughout our value chain. This consortium is a timely and much needed resource to help address one of our industry’s most difficult challenges. We are pleased to contribute to its success and to look forward to working collaboratively with our industry peers,’ concluded Kezar.

As part of these efforts the company has launched a scalable matrix recycling program in North America with RoadRunner Recycling to help label converters achieve their zero waste-to-landfill goals.

In Asia Pacific Avery Dennison collaborates with EcoBlue, a Thailand-based company that specializes in recycling PET (rPET) label liner for use in other polyester applications, to add PET label liners to its liner recycling program; and in China, Avery Dennison has launched the PET liner and matrix waste recycling program in partnership with Lvhuan.

In Europe, Avery Dennison has successfully piloted a liner collection program in selected countries. Among others, it partnered with Romei Replastics to convert waste material from the labeling process into new raw materials. The process includes collecting PET liner from customers, reshaping into flakes and high-performance compounds, and recycling into new products. 

In Latin America, Avery Dennison Brazil’s Programa Circular collects PET and paper label liners and film label matrix from converters and end-users. The program is a collaboration with the São Paulo firm Boomera, which specializes in repurposing waste material. The paper liner is processed by Polpel, and returns in the form of cellulose pulp for the manufacture of tissue paper.

Additionally, Avery Dennison’s Brazil team was recognized by the Label Industry Global Awards for its Programa Circular recycling program - the third year in a row, and the fourth year overall, that Avery Dennison has won the award for its innovations in sustainable labeling products and services.