John Avolio, value chain manager, Nova Chemicals | Notable Leaders in Sustainability 2024
When it comes to sustainability, John Avolio wants the plastics industry to be an open book.
"We can't continue to work in silos," said Avolio, value chain manager for resin maker Nova Chemicals of Calgary, Alberta. "We need to bring our work out of the shadows and share results allowing innovation and collaboration to move quickly towards adoption."
Avolio's work at Nova focuses on helping brands and retailers meet their sustainability goals and aspirations.
"When I started this role in 2019, I noticed that, as a whole, packaging producers shared similar goals, but no one was talking openly about their work, ... opportunities for improvement or lessons learned from failures," he said. "This created silos of education, which limited progress."
Nova has had success with its Brand Owner Bootcamp, where Avolio said the firm has created a network of packaging decision-makers to work together as collaborators. "We've created a venue to share opinions, thoughts, recognition and a safe space to challenge each other and ourselves," he added.
"Lessons learned within the pet foods space are equally valuable for an industry such as the dairy industry — but until Bootcamp, those industries were not collaborating."
Avolio started his plastics career as a technical service engineer for additives and color concentrates. The cartoon Futurama also played a role in his plastics journey. "In the cartoon, the residents of New New York City in the year 3000 explain to Fry, a time-traveler from the year 2000, how wasteful their society was," he recalled. "In the year 3000, sandwiches are made from old discarded sandwiches and robots are made from old discarded robots.
"It was a 10-second joke to highlight the issues that New New York was having with the abundance of trash that the previous generations left them, but it was the first time I had ever considered circularity as a future career focus."
The sustainability journey hasn't been without its challenges for Avolio and Nova. Before the start of the Bootcamp, a major brand owner started working with Nova then suddenly stopped. "After a few weeks, I reached out to the team to try to understand the reason for the resource shift and what I learned was surprising," he said. "I was told that a competing technology had convinced their leadership that a technology which was only commercial in pilot scale quantities was about to launch full scale across the U.S. and therefore they no longer needed to focus on converting their packaging to being monomaterial.
"This was the realization that we had to get uncomfortable and work outside of our knowledge silos in order to advance circular and sustainable packaging," he added. "Bootcamp was created a few months later and provided brand and retailer packaging decision-makers a sounding board to challenge those thoughts, opportunities and assumptions."
The costs of sustainability also have been a challenge for Nova, as they are to many materials firms. "Sustainable solutions might exist, but a solution that costs significantly more is rarely a commercial solution," Avolio said.
Time to market also is a factor: "When I started as value chain manager, the time from innovation at the resin producer to grocery store shelf was three to five years. By knocking down silos and working together as a value chain solution community, we have been able to reduce that to as little as 18 months."
Education around sustainability also needs to continue to play a role. "We can build the best circular packaging, but if the consumer doesn't understand how to get that package back into the correct recycling streams, it will likely still end up in a landfill," Avolio said.
He added that with every municipality having its own set of rules on what and how to recycle, recycling can be a challenge. But Avolio said plastics "have the ability to be circular, and with help from the consumer, we can create the plastic circular economy."
Looking ahead to future technologies and markets, Avolio said circular recycling models "are the most intriguing to me because they afford all the members of the value chain commercial success."
In those models, Avolio said retailers and brands send their waste plastics directly to a plastics recycling facility and then that material is used to create the next brand or retailer package via value chain engagement.
"This model allows for chain of command to not be broken, allowing for FDA compliance and direct food applications," he explained. "Yesterday's McDonald's frozen french fry package could easily be tomorrow's string cheese package and vice versa."
Avolio cited former Nova executive Carrie Richards as his industry mentor: "She saw something in me that others did not — passion. When I was coming up in the industry, having an engineering degree meant you were locked into an R&D-focused career. The transition to a commercial/marketing focused role was not commonly done.
"Carrie saw a young engineer with a passion for building change and developing relationships and gave me the opportunity to start my career on the commercial side of the business as an account manager, eventually leading to my current role as value chain manager," Avolio added.
Avolio said he enjoys his position, which he described as his "dream job."
"Working with brands and retailers … is something that I never dreamed I would do as a painfully shy college student who was studying covalent bonds of thermoset and thermoplastic polymers," he added. "I wake up every morning blessed to be a change-maker in this industry and am so thrilled to be an educator to help drive sustainable and circular solutions.
"I think back to that 10-second joke from Futurama and hope that in the year 3000 maybe just some of the progress I've help drive will lead to a different joke — one where circularity was solved in the current generation and regeneration is now the norm."
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