Meet the 100: Anh Marella, Global Director of Films – Avery Dennison

by | Jul 22, 2019

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The E+E 100 are the VPs, directors, managers and engineers who are making significant strides in driving our industry. See the complete list here or download the report for more detailed information about these leaders. And stay tuned for the Call for Submissions coming in the fall, when you can nominate your favorite sustainability or energy management professional!

Now, meet Anh Marella, global director of films for Avery Dennison, a leading manufacturer of pressure sensitive labels and adhesive technologies. As head of marketing for the films product line, Marella is in charge of building the product portfolio based on the desires of the marketplace and of existing customers.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced in the last year or two?

Our labels touch a wide variety of things: beverage applications, personal care, food. With the recycling process for PET products, the label is a contaminant. It sticks to the flakes, and you can’t reuse that in a pure form. So we have designed a process that allows the label to separate cleanly so the flakes can be used back into the bottle.

Now, we want to provide a broader set of solutions for our customers: We have a solution for PET containers, but not for HDPE — your shampoo bottles or other bottles that are opaque. Our challenge is how to create more products that can be reused in bottle-to-bottle type recycling and help enable recycling for a wider range of stuff. How do we take the niche product that we have and expand it?

How have you addressed that challenge?

As a marketer or product developer, you’re always talking to customers and their customers. But we’re living in the ecosystem outside of those immediate stakeholders, so we’re working with different types of recyclers to understand their pain, their challenges. We’re talking with municipalities to help them get people to actually recycle, and recycle the right way.

And we’re getting out there and learning. In Europe, the challenge is there’s legislation trying to drive recycling, so we’re trying to stay ahead of that. In some Asian countries, they don’t have established recycling infrastructure, so we’re following what they’re doing. Are they going to follow the established processes or look for new technologies?

Then we have a mergers and acquisitions team and other teams that look at disruptive technologies. What could happen to eliminate our industry? What happens if you don’t need a label anymore because it’s printed right on the bottle? All customers, all brands, have slightly different goals. We continue to ask how we can provide broad solutions to meet those goals.

What advice would you give other professionals as they try to accomplish their sustainability or energy management goals?

Curiosity. Always, it starts with the end-customer in terms of where you need to focus, then you need the curiosity to learn. Stretch yourself to look beyond your horizon, your business, for the nuggets of information to help you learn, like I’ll go to a materials recovery facility and put on boots and climb in a dumpster to look at the garbage.

Bring in experts, because you don’t know everything. And be good with gray. Put a line in the sand and make a decision, but be agile enough to change as you need to. You won’t always have all the info you need, but you make a decision and don’t worry about having the perfect product. Over time, you learn and it gets better. If you wait for perfection, you won’t learn. You wear the hat you’re wearing for today and look around the corner for tomorrow.

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