Premium Beauty News - As an association, the CNE is in charge of doing positive thinking focused on "useful packaging"!
Michel Fontaine - Yes quite true! Moreover, isn’t our slogan "together for the best packaging"!. In the beginning, the mission of the CNE was to develop and disseminate best practices in terms of design, utilization and marketing of packaging for consumer products.
Historically very much involved in the development of a waste prevention policy for packaging, the CNE obviously wanted to become more broadly a driving force in the creation of a responsible policy of eco-designing for consumer products.
For the CNE, this resulted in different missions:
– Develop and disseminate best practices in terms of design, utilization and marketing of packaging for consumer products,
– Become a driving force in the creation of a responsible policy of eco-designing for consumer products,
– Develop prevention through source reduction,
– Issue opinions, recommendations and advices to public authorities, on the packaging of consumer products,
– Organize a dialogue between partners.
The National Council of Packaging encourages businesses and organizations, taking a part in the packaging chain, to get involved in this active policy of prevention and to act efficiently in the design, manufacture, composition, use and recovery of packaging, while also ensuring both the integrity of the packaging’s functionalities and the use value of the product/packaging duo.
Premium Beauty News - The word "disruption" appears regularly in your communication today. What kind of a disruption exactly?
Michel Fontaine - When I took office, in order to take things forward and start a positive dynamic for packaging, we actually wanted to identify areas where it was truly possible to start a real disruptive approach, at the level of consumer behaviour, commercially or technically.
We can work, for example, on a simplification of the packaging system, in line with questions pertaining to the usage function of a case for consumers in the case of a toothpaste tube.
Premium Beauty News - Your contest Emballé 3.0 is a perfect illustration of this!
Michel Fontaine - Absolutely! We chose this title, "Emballé 3.0" simply because young people nowadays are fully integrated into a computer and Internet universe. As for this contest for students, the goal is truly to single out the packaging of the future by playing precisely on "disruption". And believe me, we were not the least disappointed by some of the presentations. Overall, fifty schools and/or universities were requested to participate. In the end 87 students, in engineering or design, participated to this contest.
The awards ceremony was held on January 27. This first edition awarded four teams, whose proposals are remarkable in terms of waste prevention and eco-design. I was very impressed by the range of natural shampoo powder given by AgroParisTech Massy.
We will repeat this event every year.
Premium Beauty News - A word about another work of yours under progress, the prevention indicators.
Michel Fontaine - Pursuant to mission regarding the prevention of packaging waste, the CNE has developed with the support of its partners, a methodology to analysis source reduction, which is a repository of prevention cases and which can be found on our website.
The CNE, with its partners, decided to objectify prevention by defining a list of 4 relevant and explanatory indicators concerning flows or environmental impacts.
These indicators are:
– Mass: it refers to the total weight of all the components of the complete packaging system,
– The contents/container volume ratio: it reflects the ability of the packaging of the consumer sales units to contain in an optimized way the product,
– The Palletizing volume ratio: This is the ratio between the volume of all these consumer sales units on a pallet and the volume of the pallet load,
– The utilization ratio of recycled material: the share of recycled material will be the proportion, by mass, of post consumer recycled material in the complete packaging system.
We are updating its methodology for prevention through source reduction by including new indicators.
