For a future without waste

Wheat Pink She is CEO of Ecoembes, Graduate and Doctor in Chemical Sciences and PDG from IESE.

The environment needs us to look to the future with a positive approach. With the conviction that, despite everything, We have complex challenges aheadbut also exciting, that will make us evolve towards new paradigms in global sustainability.

Sometimes we are not aware enough of everything we have achieved. Enough? It is very likely that it will not be, but not so much because of the scarcity of what has been achieved, but rather because of the fact that the problems change, mutate and transform, forcing us to do the same with the responses that we design to mitigate them. Let us remember that Sustainability is not a goal, but a path.

In the last months of 2024, we have seen less progress than expected in the three COPs (United Nations Conference of the Parties) held on Climate Change, Biodiversity and Desertification, as well as in the Summit on measures to reduce the environmental impact of the plastics. However, nature pollution and the impacts of climate change they show us the worst side of ourselves.

Furthermore, although in Europe the circularity rate in 2023 has risen three points to reach 11.8%, In Spain we have seen how it is reduced to 8.5%. Much remains to be done and work to bend the curve in the less desirable aspects, causing an acceleration in the implementation of the circular economy as a global reference for all types of human activity.

Making packaging recycling possible in Spain has been the objective of Ecoembes since we were born as an organization, responding to the environmental needs of companies, collaborating with public administrations and making it possible to satisfy a social demand to preserve the Planet. We have created a circle of close collaboration, ensuring that recycling is a fundamental part of citizens’ lives.

But we need more. Complex problems require complex and, above all, transversal responses. We must aspire to a future without waste. And that means understanding that recycling is not the solution, but part of the solution. In this new approach, we must avoid synecdoche, from understanding a part as a whole, because circularity is much more than recycling. It is above all reducing, but also redesigning, reusing, recovering, rehabilitating, regenerating… And, as a last option, recycling.

We are aware that the panorama is becoming more complicated, because the challenge is huge. The environmental impacts of human activity, especially with regard to waste generation, are unsustainable. The Planet can no longer stand the growing human pressure that generates extracting, producing, consuming and discarding.

We have already surpassed six of the nine planetary limits that experts indicate as critical. It is time to remember that without the environment there is no worthwhile economy, because growth can never be infinite in a limited environment.

The activity we carry out promoting the recycling of domestic, and now also commercial and industrial, packaging, allows us actively collaborate in stopping this excess in the planetary limits and in the impacts on the Planet, always combining this goal with the search for the improvement of human well-being and the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

We want to be part of the change, from a governance based on principles and values ​​such as integrity, transparency, sustainability, collaboration, efficiency, rigor, innovation and proactivity. But change requires co-responsibility of the entire society, at a global level, and a willingness to do things differently.

We believe that this is the best way to build positively and face all the challenges that we must overcome in 2025. As Charles Darwin said, “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent species that survives, but the one that best adapts to change.”. We are in it. Because if we do not make a radical transformation of our way of living urgently, we will not achieve a future without waste.