Conai – National Packaging Consortium (www.conai.org)

Conai is a private consortium that operates as a non-profitmaking organization and, since more than 20 years, has been an effective system for the recovery, recycling and valorization of steel, aluminum, paper, wood, plastic and glass packaging materials. Today more than 850,000 packaging manufacturers and users belong to the Consortium System.

The Conai model bases its strength on the principle of “shared responsibility”, which presupposes the involvement of all the actors in waste management: from the companies which produce and use packaging, to the public administration, which establishes the rules for waste management on a local basis, to the general public who, with the daily gesture of segregated waste collection, initiate a virtuous process for the environment, right up to to the companies that recycle.
Once again the Consortium features as a protagonist at Ipack-Ima, occupying a prominent space in Hall 14. The 160-square-meter stand in the heart of the Ipack-Mat exhibition will for four days be a center for aggregation and comparison on the issues of environmental sustainability of packaging, considered in all respects a competitive development lever and in support of which Conai has developed numerous and varied tools.

Target: prevention
“Designing recycling”. As anticipated by Luca Brivio, Conai Communications Manager: «Our presence at Ipack-Mat entails the direct relationship with sector operators, to whom we will illustrate among other things the online “Design Recycling” platform where, for now, we have published the Guidelines to facilitate the recycling of plastic packaging and, in the near future, those relating to aluminium packaging. The platform – states the manager – is one of the prevention activities implemented by CONAI from the perspective of the “cradle to cradle” strategy, and we propose it as a discussion space open to the entire supply chain, which users can access after authentication and comment on the documents available».

Eco Tool and the Conai 2018 Call. Ipack-Mat will also offer the opportunity to talk to the market about the characteristics of the CONAI Eco Tool, which enables the evaluation of the sustainability of packaging through a comparison, in terms of environmental impact, between the packaging before and after the intervention adopted. And, Brivio goes on to underline «it is an important means for the member companies, who intend to participate in the” CONAI Call for Prevention – Valorize the environmental sustainability of packaging», of which we have just launched the fifth edition and for which we are giving away a prize pool of 400,000 euros: 60,000 for the most virtuous cases for each packaging material supply chain (steel, aluminum, paper, wood, plastic and glass) and 10,000 euros for the case considered most significant from a technical/design point of view among the solutions put on the market in the two year period 2016-2017».
As ever hence sizeable the economic resources allocated by the Consortium to reward the research and development efforts of the consortium companies, be they producers or users of packaging, who have revised their packaging with a view to innovation and environmental sustainability, acting on at least one of the Conai levers (reuse, facilitation of recycling activities, saving of raw material, use of materials from recycling, optimization of logistics, simplification of the packaging system and optimization of production processes).
In this regard, we recall that, compared to the previous editions, the 2018 edition includes higher prizes for virtuous cases to be awarded, thanks to the assignment of higher scores for each prevention lever activated.

Bando Prevenzione Conai 2018

Applications for the 2018 Conai Prevention Call must be submitted by 30 June by completing the appropriate online form available on the website www.ecotoolconai.org. They will then be analyzed through the Conai Eco Tool, which allows a simplified LCA analysis to be performed, calculating the effects of prevention actions actions implemented by companies in terms of energy, water and CO2 reduction.

Italian