Stephen Kapantais, Novolex | Notable Leaders in Sustainability 2023

Stephen Kapantais was a police officer for three and a half years before deciding to go back to engineering school.

That was where he first saw the plastics department and became excited about going into plastics engineering. His first industry role was assembling extruders and dies in college.

Kapantais graduated from the University of Massachusetts Lowell with a bachelor's degree in plastics engineering, then worked for a company that made plastics for medical applications and automotive interiors. He also worked as a national sales manager, business development manager and technical director for Amcor.

He joined food packaging maker Novolex in Chelmsford, Mass., at the end of 2020 as the technical director for rigid plastics.

"We have customers who want sustainable products and come to us to help achieve their sustainable goals, but in the last two years, Novolex has developed our own sustainable goals as a company. Sustainability is front of mind internally, from the CEO down," Kapantais said. "We work closely with customers to help them consider different materials and designs to meet their sustainability goals and enable their products to contribute to the circular economy."

Over the summer, Novolex released its fifth annual sustainability report, which highlights the company's progress toward environmental, social and governance commitments. "Novolex has increased its recycling capacity, including a plan to double production of recycled content in our North Vernon, Ind., recycling facility in 2024," Kapantais added.

Plastics play an important role in the daily lives of consumers, especially regarding food-safe packaging, but Kapantais said the plastics industry must do a better job of improving sustainability through recyclable and reusable plastics.

"We can tackle this issue by designing products for recyclability and reuse and ensuring that we're using post-consumer recycled materials in our process. For example, in our North American rigid plastics operations, we have increased our pounds of PET PCR used significantly over the past two years and hope to invest further in 2024 to support additional utilization," he said.

Kapantais is most interested in reusable products: "At Novolex, we're working on multiple projects with small distributors and the largest brick-and-mortar stores out there on how we reuse, recapture and clean products, and then get them back out in the marketplace."

In October, the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team announced a partnership with Bold Reuse to phase out single-use packaging in sports and entertainment venues. Novolex is the supplier of the polypropylene Rip City Reuse cup, and Novolex-brand Eco-Products will provide compostable products.

Kapantais is legally blind and is involved with the Lions Clubs International, "which is the largest organization that provides help and service to blind and visually impaired individuals, as well as other groups that are facing challenges or are in need." He is also a local advocate for Americans With Disabilities Act accessibility.

After Kapantais lost his eyesight, he also lost the majority of his job. He continued to work, "but it wasn't sustainability-related work or anything I was passionate about." Through this experience, however, he learned new skills that he has been able to deploy both personally and professionally.

"This process taught me the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. I'm a proud member of the Novolex Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team and often speak to how much my perspective changed when I was going through this process," he said.

"In my career, I've worked on taking away my pessimistic views and approaching my customers from a place of understanding. Today, I sit down with customers, get to know them, understand their sustainability goals and identify what it is we want to achieve," he added. "Ultimately, everyone gets treated the same by me. It is important to remember that you never know someone's background, and you have to treat everyone with the same level of respect."