HYDERABAD: A massive lack of awareness, when it came to sustainable packaging alternatives in India, both on the consumer as well as vendor’s end, birthed the country’s first-ever Sustainable Packaging Summit this week. We speak to one of the co-founders of organisers The Mend Packaging — Rishika Reddy, a Hyderabadi who is wowing the world by letting her actions speak louder than words.
Taking us through the inception of The Mend Packaging, Rishika narrates, “The Mend is one of India’s first sustainable packaging companies, and transforms discarded materials to create innovative packaging solutions for brands across the globe. We pioneered in using international and domestic technologies to make products that are made from recycled, biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable materials and we offer customised solutions that cater to the market’s exploding need for sustainable alternatives, especially now with legislative bans on plastic. We offer end-to-end solutions right from packaging design to manufacturing and execution, to creating solutions for circular packaging including disposal options.”
The Mend came into being during the pandemic, one of the co-founders ordered a small pack of batteries that was delivered in a large box. Shocked by the amount of packaging waste one order generated, it became a larger discussion on the effect packaging waste has on the environment. Several months of research and testing later, three women — Prianka Jhaveri, Rishika Reddy and Rhea Kothari — came up with a catalogue of sustainable packaging solutions that would mitigate the problem of packaging waste and lessen the negative impact on the environment.
Talking about that ‘lightbulb moment’ of curating India’s first ever Sustainable Packaging Summit, Rishika responds, “Over the roughly two years of being in business, we realised that there was a massive lack of awareness when it came to sustainable packaging alternatives in India, both on the consumer as well as vendor side. We spoke to multiple industry experts in the sustainability and packaging space who seemed to be facing the same issue.
We received countless messages from packaging experts in the field, eager to discuss the impact The Mend was making and ways we could collaborate and generate awareness of the benefits. Wanting to consolidate all those interesting conversations in one place, a lightbulb moment occurred to create a summit where experts in the field could discuss the future of sustainable packaging in India and brainstorm ideas to raise awareness about the topic.”
Speaking about the summit that will be held over Zoom from September 23-24 (10am — 3pm), she shares that through this, Mend aims to understand the view of a consumer on sustainability in packaging, facilitate a dynamic platform for all aspiring packaging professionals to come to share, and represent their innovative packaging solutions. “Our target audience is packaging students and early-in career packaging professionals who can get a headstart on the inner workings of the industry. We also wanted to make this summit inclusive to everyone that takes an interest in sustainability and the space in India.
Our panellists are diverse in terms of their professions and their views- offering a balanced approach to the entire summit,” she adds. Of their many panels, their sustainable packaging alternatives and technological solutions certainly stand out. “It is one of the main panels in the summit as it delves into the importance of life cycle assessment’s role (GHG tracking) in packaging and distinctive sustainable packaging and technological solutions accessible to India. While we are equally excited by all of the panels but the third panel should be interesting since it offers a forward-looking perspective and has a focus on policy and governance that has not been covered before,” says she.