“We must make packaging more attractive as a varied professional field”

Making food safe and available everywhere and protecting what’s good – food, people and the planet – is the vision of Tetra Pak, one of the world’s leading suppliers of processing and packaging solutions for food. This is the also the vision of Caroline Babendererde, Head of Sustainability Mid Europe at Tetra Pak. For 21 years, she has been campaigning for progressive packaging solutions. Her efforts for sustainability go hand in hand with initiatives for diversity and equal opportunities. In the interview, Caroline Babendererde explains how Tetra Pak brings a passion for packaging to young people, the role of women in the industry, and why stakeholders should focus more on the packaging itself.

Tightly Packed: As Head of Sustainability, you hold a leadership position with a great deal of responsibility. How did you first join the packaging industry? What was your motivation?

Caroline Babendererde: After finishing my studies of physical geography and landscape ecology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and two further phases of my career, I received a fantastic offer from Tetra Pak at the beginning of 2003 – right at the time a deposit on single-use PET bottles and tins was being introduced in Germany. My motivation to become part of the Tetra Pak family was their reputation and the role of the company as a pioneer in terms of sustainability even then. This has not changed to this day – and for 21 years, nothing has changed my conviction and faith in the Tetra Pak team! Every day brings new topics to familiarise ourselves with, which also means that we have to continue expanding our knowledge. This is exactly what I always wanted.

Tightly Packed: Can you give us an example project from your career that you are especially proud of?

Caroline Babendererde: The exciting thing about my job is the incredible variety of our projects! So it’s not exactly easy to pick just one. One recent strategically important project where I myself learned a lot was Tetra Pak’s internal responsibility for building the Palurec company, a joint investment project with two other beverage packaging manufacturers, Elopak and SIG. Palurec was put into commission in 2021 to recycle polyethylene and aluminium components in cardboard beverage packaging. The ability to separate all the material components of beverage packaging and then process them to become high-quality secondary raw materials for the respective industries was a very important step for our sector. This process increases the recyclability of cardboard packaging for beverages to more than 90%.

Tightly Packed: You immediately confirmed our request for an interview for “Women in Packaging”. What personal experience or encounters inspired you to support women in the industry?

Caroline Babendererde: Leadership positions in the packaging industry and the filling/bottling industry are still predominantly held by men. However, when it comes to the fields of sustainability, marketing and communication within those companies, I mostly meet women who have excellent qualifications and who carry out their functions with a great deal of motivation, pragmatism and conviction. I always enjoy this very open exchange, where we also talk about challenges and work on solutions with a strong hands-on mindset. Through my lectures at different institutes of higher education, some of which have study programmes for packaging engineers, I see so many young women with brilliant ideas which deserve equal support.

Tightly Packed: Do you think that the packaging industry has changed over the recent years in terms of gender diversity? If so, how?

Caroline Babendererde: Yes, I have made the same observation. I see more and more women in the packaging industry, but still far too few in leadership positions. It is important to increase this number. The more visible women become in our industry, the more young women, too, will feel addressed and motivated, I am sure of that.

Tightly Packed: How can companies encourage young talents and especially young women to follow a career in the packaging industry?

Caroline Babendererde: Packaging is a part of our lives from childhood, so to speak – and it is certain that the public focus changed a lot during the 1980s and at the latest in 1991, when the packaging regulation came into force and the yellow bag for plastic waste was introduced. With the plastics debate of 2018, the following introduction of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive and the current debate concerning the PPWR, the entire industry is facing challenges as well as great opportunities. And these opportunities, in my opinion, should be integrated at all levels of our education system. We must create a lot more awareness of how important packaging is, especially for the food industry, for protecting filled and bottled products, preventing food waste and thus minimising the climate impact. This would help to cast packaging into a different light for young people, not only women, and to make it more attractive as a professional field with lots of variety. Packaging will always exist; this is a field that has a future even if there will always continue to be changes. But this is exactly what makes it so exciting!

Tightly Packed: And how do you manage this at Tetra Pak?

Caroline Babendererde: We make a point of addressing young people at job fairs for students or directly through institutes of higher education. At Tetra Pak, we take a clear and global stand for diversity and equity, and we have numerous initiatives that support different talents through inclusive mentoring, for example. There is also a programme specifically for women, which offers them the the opportunity of winning leading managers from other companies as their mentors. Moreover, at a local level, we offer flexible working hours or work schedules for an improved work-life balance, and we have also been monitoring equal pay among genders for all employees and offering applicants the same starting conditions for some years.

Tightly Packed: What is the role of sustainability initiatives in ensuring your company’s attractiveness for the next generation of leading managers?

Caroline Babendererde: Sustainability initiatives and activities can only exert a powerful pull for companies if they are present on platforms relevant to young people and are communicated in a way that appeals to them. I don’t think that many junior leading managers enjoy reading convoluted sustainability reports, which is something I do understand in general. But on the other hand, this is exactly the information young people need. We are dealing with a generation shaped by Fridays for Future, often following a vegetarian or vegan diet, but also with expectations regarding work-life balance. We have be understanding and take this into account during recruiting.

Tightly Packed: What are your personal goals and visions regarding diversity, sustainability and their role in the packaging industry?

Caroline Babendererde: How much time do you have? ;-) My personal goal is to increase awareness of the importance of packaging in all stakeholders, especially those in a political environment. If we want to overcome the global challenges posed by sustainable food infrastructures, we need packaging that offers products comprehensive protection so that they reach customers both safely and with the same quality as on the day they were packed. This includes sustainable packaging along the entire value creation chain. We need clean basics like life cycle assessments. Without them, we cannot have any fact-based, scientifically proven and non-ideological discussions, nor can we make the respective decisions. Right now, and not only within the packaging industry, parties are being pitted against each other instead of having a real look at which packaging is the best for which application or product from a comprehensive ecological perspective.

With regard to diversity, I hope that in the near future we will be in the happy situation that equity and diversity are simply a matter of course. Some things have changed already, but there is still a long way for us to go, especially in training and education. And that is where the sustainable future of our business, and ultimately our planet, is decided.