14 Mar 2024 Sustainability plan
As has become a tradition at Rieusset, every year we talk about the new features of our sustainability plan and analyze the results achieved during the last year. This time we are interviewing Ángela Berbis Serrat, Sustainability Technician at Rieusset.
Ángela is an industrial design and product development engineer. She has experience in the cosmetics sector as a packaging engineer, in the electronics sector as a product development engineer and in the automotive sector as a process engineer. However, she has always liked sustainability and decided to study a master’s degree in sustainable design and follow a different direction in her professional career.
In September 2023, Angela found at Rieusset the opportunity to work in a position that is 100% focused on environmental sustainability and we have been proud to have her in our team ever since.
What are your professional goals?
Doing my bit and making sure that the work I do really has a positive impact on the environment and on society. This involves raising awareness among the people who work with me so that they believe the same, since the ideal is to work as a team so that everyone believes that my work is also theirs, and together we may achieve a positive impact.
Why did you make a change in your career path?
Everything I had done so far was associated with a more industrial aspect and I felt that I was missing something, as I have never felt comfortable with the idea of creating to sell or to be liked. When I decided to study sustainable design, I saw that I was really passionate about it and it was what I wanted to dedicate my future to – that’s when I decided to change my career path.
What is your role at Rieusset and how do you collaborate within the sustainability project?
Primarily, my tasks are identifying shortcomings, opportunities for improvement and inefficient practices in waste, carbon footprint, product life cycle analysis and environment-related certifications. In other words, adopting a holistic perspective in order to understand the current state of the organization and collaborate on all aspects related to the environment and sustainability with the aim of optimizing them.
What are your most important projects?
- Developing the Pack Impact tool. This is a tool capable of measuring the impact of our products in order to create a strategic plan that indicates where we can reduce the environmental impact of the products we have at Rieusset and find more sustainable options. You can find all the details about this project in this article.
- Covering Scope 3 in carbon footprint reporting. We report our carbon footprint every year taking into account Scope 1 and 2, but this year we want to go further and also cover Scope 3. Therefore, this year we want to include: business travel, employee commuting, product and raw material transportation and waste transportation. Measuring more allows us to have more margin and more capacity for improvement, so our strategic plan will be much more complete.
- Waste treatment. It is extremely important to identify the waste generated at the plant in order to be able to classify it correctly and also for recovery. To this end, this year our goal is that no waste should end up in the landfill.
Rieusset’s sustainability plan focuses on three axes:
- waste recovery
- life cycle analysis of your products
- the influence you can exert on your suppliers so that they act in the same line of work
How have you evolved over the last year in each of these areas?
- Waste recovery: In the last year we have been working with waste managers to find more environmentally friendly ways of recovery.
- Life cycle analysis of your products: Testing has begun with the above-mentioned Pack Impact tool, which helps us to determine the environmental impact of our products.
- Influence on suppliers: We have started to work with a platform where suppliers have to enter the information needed by Rieusset on sustainability aspects. This gives us a global view of the suppliers we have both at Rieusset and in the Gerosa Group.
What are the objectives of the sustainability plan to be achieved by 2024?
- Reducing waste from printed material
- Reducing water, electricity and gas consumption
- Increasing the % of recycled material in both raw materials and packaging; this year the objective is to have all packaging recycled.
What changes have you implemented at Rieusset over the past year that have had a positive impact on the environment?
On the one hand, we created a work team made up of people from the areas of engineering, sustainability and maintenance, who meet every month to carry out and implement actions to reduce Rieusset’s consumption of electricity, water and gas.
On the other hand, we have achieved that more than 70% of the bags used come from recycled plastic.
Have you achieved sustainability certifications in 2023? Which ones?
In 2023 we achieved the Ecovadis Platinum Qualification, a recognition that Ecovadis awards only to the top 1% of organizations that achieve the best scores in corporate social responsibility, environmental, ethical, human rights and supply chain management.
We have also renewed the following sustainability certificates: ISO 14001, FSC, ISCC+ and DPG. Discover all our certifications here.
What are you doing at Rieusset to reduce your carbon footprint?
On the one hand, and most importantly, we continuously analyze the consumption of water, electricity and gas (which have a very direct impact) in order to be more efficient and carry out actions to reduce our carbon footprint.
On the other hand, we are focusing on waste and its treatment, as I mentioned earlier.
Finally, including Scope 3 to analyze the impact of raw material and product transport and see how we can optimize and improve them.
What do you think about the new Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD)? It is about to come out in Spain and points still need to be clarified.
It is necessary and very important to start making changes, therefore, presenting an ambitious deadline that accelerates the process, the way I see it, is a good change but only as long as it is backed by solid legislation.
In my opinion, this will drive the need to innovate and develop optimal packaging solutions that avoid the depletion and waste of resources, and the adoption of innovative packaging designs for greater reuse and recycling.
In any case, it remains to be seen what they propose to implement, as it has not yet been decided.
Finally, what would you say to companies that want to start their journey towards sustainability in the packaging of their products?
I recommend starting small without wanting to cover too much, for example by starting with environmental waste management. The world of sustainability can be very ambitious, since many things can be improved, but it is always better to go slowly and carefully.
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