Okay, it’s pretty obvious that we’re in the middle of a great debate about how to treat our planet – but a third wave? It’s true! As early as the late 80s, Klaus Töpfer, who was the environmental minister of Germany at the time, got together with experts such as Prof. Dieter Berndt, who studied sustainability in the packaging industry even as early as the 70s, to find solutions, for instance to replace landfills as the primary waste deposit option. That was the first wave.

The second wave is primarily represented by the dual system of waste management, the UN conference in Rio and many, many other notable events in environmental policy ... The Green Deal of 2019 in the EU is yet another huge milestone – and part of the third wave. Its aim is to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases in the European Union to zero by 2050. This would make Europe the first climate-neutral continent in the world.

But that’s not all: At its core, the Green Deal is primarily an instrument for promoting a circular economy. This is the case simply because more than half of the emission reductions have to be achieved through expanding the circular economy. And when you think about the circular economy, you quickly end up thinking about packaging and then, even more quickly, about plastics – after all, they make up around 60 percent of packaging materials.