Acting Boldly for Sustainability

Georges Gravanis, President, Label and Graphic Materials Group at Avery Dennison

Sustainability —doing the right thing for people, planet and our own long-term business viability— is part of who we are at Avery Dennison. It’s an ethic that stems from our founder Stan Avery himself, who set the course and tone for our company more than eight decades ago.  

Sustainability is a key part of our strategy—a focus for our CEO and for myself in my capacity as president of our global Label and Graphic Materials group.

We have big goals for 2025 - which you can learn more about in this film - and we have clear ambition for change. So, certainly, senior leadership commitment is important.

However, I take great pride in seeing that it is our employees at every level, in every region, that are really driving real change for our organisation.

Throughout this year thousands of Avery Dennison employees have shown that they’re a force for good—lending their time and talent in our communities, and, in our business, creating progressive action plans to help us reach our goals.

It is our team that has thought big and acted boldly to overcome many challenges in building a wind turbine in Turnhout, Belgium, that will provide 30% of the site’s electricity needs, and it is their commitment that has enabled us to surpass our 2016 GHG goal by reducing our market-based absolute emissions by nearly 12%.

It is our team that is making great progress in our waste goals - ensuring that by the end of 2016 91% of our solid waste was diverted from landfills and that 59 of our sites worldwide were operating landfill-free. Furthermore we recycled 58 percent of the waste we diverted. Our employees are committed to improving this further and collaborating within the industry to drive out waste across the value chain.

And it is our employee focus that keeps our employees safe - Ensuring that our recordable incident rate (RIR) in 2016 was world class at 0.25, far surpassing the manufacturing industry average of 3.8 in 2015, the most recently available average.

So, as a leader, my commitment to sustainability is resolute. Not only because it is the logical path to a healthy planet and a strong business, but also because it honors and supports our employees around the world who are driving change everyday.

#togetherAD #togetherwecan #pioneeringchange

To learn more about Avery Dennison Label and Packaging Materials, visit www.label.averydennison.com.

To learn more about our Sustainability efforts, visit www.sustainability.averydennison.com.

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