Perviously, the guide has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Thai, Latvian, Czech, Hungarian and Georgian.
Created by WPO, Circular Analytics, FH Campus University of Applied Sciences and ECR Community, the guide serves as an initial resource for best practice examples. It employs state-of-the-art technology that can be adapted and customised to align with the recovery and recyclability capabilities and infrastructure at both regional and local levels.
The formal launch of the Japanese version was undertaken during a WPO board meeting held in South Africa, with the presence of the former president, Pierre Pienaar, current president, Luciana Pellegrino, representative from Japan Packaging Institute (JPI), Hiroko Akieda, and vice president of sustainability and the Save Food packaging consortium, Nerida Kelton.
Luciana Pellegrino said: “The ‘Packaging Design for Recycling Guide’ is a very important tool for the global packaging community to ensure that our industry is taking steady steps, based on scientific foundations, to achieve a circular economy model. It contributes to addressing the challenges that face the world in terms of climate change, environment and preservation of natural resources.”
She continued: “We highly recommend the industry to explore this Guide in a way of driving efforts based on a common voice of the packaging industry in terms of recycling and circular economy”.
Yoichi Sonoyama, managing director JPI, said: “We wanted to play our role in ensuring that our industry has access to the latest resources, training and guides. By delivering better packaging design to everyone, we will be able to provide better packaging around the world. This design guide will help to aid this objective.”
Nerida Kelton added: “These translations are no small feat and require experts in technical packaging terminology to be able to accurately formulate the translation… we are looking forward to launching even more guides in 2024. The goal is to ensure that every country in the world has access to the guide so that we can design our waste at the start and ensure that packaging is recycle-ready.”