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New board at the IPV

A new board member, Jens Vonderheid, has taken up his position at the Industrial Association for Paper and Plastic Packaging.

A new Board of Directors has taken up its work at the Industrial Association for Paper and Plastic Packaging. Jens Vonderheid, Managing Director of Hera Papierverarbeitung GmbH, takes over from Klaus Jahn. 

Thomas Walcha, Managing Director of Heinrich Ludwig Verpackungsmittel GmbH in Siebenlehn, was re-elected as Treasurer. He has been a member of the board for some time. The future of the association will also be in the hands of Carsten Gütt (Duni Group), Mike Hartung (Graf Verpackungen) and Harald Schäfer as members of the board. Jens Vonderheid worked at management level at Hera for a long time before becoming the sole owner of the company in 2018.

„I would like to thank you for the trust you placed in me during the election. The rejuvenated Board of Directors has big shoes to fill, but also brings a lot of experience with it. That helps, of course. Of course, we would like to focus more on technical innovations and improved manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, due to new or revised regulations at national and European level, we are constantly driven to work on completely different construction sites. Our members have enough work to do in their own companies. First and foremost, there is a shortage of skilled workers and labour, and the steadily declining number of trainees is becoming increasingly alarming.“

Jens Vonderheid

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The bureaucratic and legal tasks facing the new Executive Board are enormous. For this reason, the IPV also in the Frankfurt office. There are plans to expand Managing Director Karsten Hunger's team accordingly in 2023. „Above all, there will be bureaucratic tasks that need to be solved in the coming years, for example, dealing with the amendment to the EU packaging regulation,“ explains Karsten Hunger.

The regulation, previously a directive, is expected to include, among other things, extended reusable quotas, minimum recyclate utilisation quotas for plastic and requirements for design for recycling. All of this must be harmonised with the German Packaging Act and is expected to be adopted by the European elections in 2024. Major challenges with little time left which is fuelling companies' concerns about similar technical errors in the legislation as with the Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUPD) from 2021.

However, the EU packaging regulation is by no means the only construction site: the Revised minimum standard for measuring the recyclability of packaging, the publication of the Printing Inks Ordinance and the „eternal“ battle over the Mineral Oil Ordinance continue to occupy the association and its members outside of day-to-day business. Added to this is the Introduction of the litter fund and the pending plans for a plastic or packaging tax. „If we only ever have to deal with regulatory requirements, there is a great risk that there will be too little time left for real operational and technical tasks,“ concludes Vonderheid.

Source: Industrieverband Papier- und Kunststoffverpackung e.V.

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