Michael Colarossi
Head of Enterprise Sustainability
Avery Dennison is celebrating its 90th anniversary, having evolved from its origins as the creator of the first pressure-sensitive label to become a material science and digital identification company.
Its products are ubiquitous in daily life, appearing on countless consumer goods from shampoo bottles to apparel.
“We’ve been around for quite some time,” says Michael Colarossi, Head of Enterprise Sustainability at Avery Dennison. “Our products are on a lot of end consumer products that we all touch and engage with every day.”
In recent years, Avery Dennison has increasingly focused on integrating digital technology and sustainability into its core offerings, reflecting both internal values and external market demands.
"Over time – and particularly over the last decade or so – we've seen these trends of digital and sustainability become more and more important for us as a company, but also for our customers," Michael notes.
"We've incorporated more tech into our labelling products, like RFID technology. We're the world's largest producer of high frequency RFID technology to enable and address some of these big challenges."
Key challenges in supply chain sustainability
According to Michael, businesses face three primary challenges in supply chain sustainability over the coming decade.
First is supply chain resilience, a concern that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic but remains critical. Companies need agile supply chains with multiple sources to navigate disruptions ranging from pandemics to geopolitical crises.
The second revolves around supply chain waste in all its forms.
Michael explains: "Supply chains in general are long and they tend to be quite inefficient, producing waste across multiple geographies, particularly as global supply chains have taken hold. That waste represents cost and it’s raising the pressure on organisations from a financial perspective."
Finally, Michael points to addressing greenhouse gas emissions and extended producer responsibility, with firms facing growing regulatory scrutiny in relation to their Scope 3 emissions and supply chain transparency.
However, he believes the meeting of physical and digital worlds offers promising answers to these sustainability challenges.
"A lot of the solutions will occur at this intersection of physical and digital worlds," says Michael. "Our focus is on ensuring that every physical product or item within a supply chain has a unique digital ID. We do that through digital sensing technologies like RFID, NFC and QR codes."
This digital identification enables companies to assign data to individual items, creating visibility throughout the supply chain. The apparel industry has already embraced this approach with the aforementioned RFID technology.
Once this infrastructure is in place, AI can extract deeper insights from the collected data, as Michael explains: "Once you have all of the information identified, leveraging technologies like AI to manipulate the data to obtain deeper insights is the next level of supply chain efficiency.”
Industry-wide packaging initiatives
In the packaging sector, sustainability initiatives typically originate from brands first before being followed by regulatory pressure.
Current industry collaborations focus on improving recyclability and creating more efficient waste collection and sorting systems. There are also joint efforts to address regulations like the European Packaging Waste Directive.
However, Michael notes an inherent tension in these collaborations.
He continues: "I think we need to recognise that, particularly in the CPG space, packaging is both a means by which the product is carried but also something that has significant brand impact around shelf appeal and usability. A lot of companies are looking at packaging as a point of differentiation as well."
This dual role of packaging – as both functional container and brand differentiator – has the potential to limit industry-wide collaboration.
Sustainability in Avery Dennison's supply chain
For Avery Dennison, sustainability has been a priority for several years, driven by both internal commitments and external pressures.
"It's only taken on more importance as we see trends around consumers looking to have more traceability and transparency of their products," Michael says. "We did a study, the Missing Billions report, which found a majority of consumers are expecting to see transparency from brands. So, that gets pushed into the supply chain."
Avery Dennison has implemented numerous initiatives aimed at integrating sustainability throughout its own supply chain, starting with supplier assessments and evolving to more sophisticated approaches.
"We started off with questionnaires and audits with internal Avery Dennison employees, but also external support to assess our supply chain to identify potential risks and mitigate those risks," Michael goes on. “We then deploy tools like EcoVadis to evaluate and score suppliers and incorporate that into our decision-making process."
What’s more, the organisation has established clear policies regarding supplier conduct, as well as dedicated resources within procurement teams to drive sustainability conversations.
More recently, Avery Dennison began using AI and machine learning tools to evaluate its supply chain through different risk lenses.
Collaboration with supply chain partners
Major players in chemicals and adhesives are among those whose contributions help Avery Dennison make good on its sustainability promises.
Michael says: “We have dedicated resources going in and working with these companies to have conversations around innovation and what they’re doing to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of the products they're selling to us.
"It’s a very focused effort with our biggest and most important supply chain partners to really look at it holistically and identify opportunities where they can reduce their environmental impact, which ultimately helps us to reduce ours further upstream.”
When discussing Scope 3 emissions, Michael emphasises the importance of organisations taking individual responsibility throughout the supply chain.
"Scope 3 drives interconnectivity and interdependence within the supply chain,” he concludes. “So, from that perspective, monitoring and reporting is absolutely essential to drive all of us to achieve our greenhouse gas ambitions.
"Scope 3 is a mechanism by which we drive accountability in the supply chain. From that perspective, it's critical.”
To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.
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