AkzoNobel creates new Sustainable Innovation team for Industrial Coatings

AkzoNobel has created a new Sustainable Innovation team for Industrial Coatings on various materials and products, including packaging.

Tessa Slagter will lead the initiative as manager of sustainable innovation. Also participating in this team are Ana Sanséau-Blanchard as sustainable product manager and Kyra Boschma as sustainability analyst. All three will work with all segments and regions of the industrial coatings business to strengthen and align capabilities and give AkzoNobel the best opportunity to achieve its sustainability goals.

The team will also support AkzoNobel’s customers, the packaging manufacturers, to make a significant difference in reducing their carbon emissions and achieving their own sustainability goals.

In 2021, AkzoNobel expressed its ambitious goal to reduce carbon emissions across its entire value chain, which includes customers and suppliers, by 50% (absolute) by 2030, taking 2018 as its benchmark. This ambition, aligned with the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit climate change and ensure that global temperatures do not rise more than 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels.

Chris Bradford, AkzoNobel’s industrial coatings marketing manager, says that reducing carbon emissions throughout the value chain is imperative: “While we continue to look closely at sustainability in the development of our own new coating technologies and raw material sourcing, we also know that a significant amount of emissions are in our customers’ application and curing processes, solvent emissions and end-of-life.

Bradford says, “New low-carbon coatings and application technologies can lower a customer’s carbon footprint, but we recognize that changes to their processes can be costly. Our new Sustainable Innovation team will help bring together our low-carbon products, customer processes and business models to achieve meaningful, collaborative progress.”

This Sustainable Innovation team will engage with customers, as well as trade and industry bodies, to implement the sustainability strategy for the Industrial Coatings business unit. They will also be responsible for progress reporting on carbon reduction and sustainable innovation across the portfolio of services and solutions.