Sustainable Packaging: Eco Guardian in Conversation

Anil Abrol:

So we see a very bright future for the sustainable packaging industry across the world. Food Service has adopted the sustainable packaging. You go to a restaurant and they are using a sustainable packaging, whether it is a compostable or a reusable or recyclable. But food processing has not yet adopted the sustainable packaging, so we are creating some innovative solutions.

Michael Torrance:

Welcome to Sustainability Leaders. I'm Michael Torrance, Chief Sustainability Officer at BMO. On this show, we will talk with leading sustainability practitioners from the corporate, investor, academic, and NGO communities to explore how this rapidly evolving field of sustainability is impacting global investment, business practices and our world.

Disclosure:

The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of Bank of Montreal, its affiliates or subsidiaries.

Issam Majeed:

Hello, I'm Issam Majeed, Managing Director Diversified Industries with BMO Corporate Finance. Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by Anil Abrol, founder and CEO of Eco Guardian. Eco Guardian has been helping lead the way in sustainable packaging for the last 20 years. The company is at the forefront of the fight against environmental degradation, specializing in organic and eco-friendly products designed to minimize waste and pollution. Anil, thank you for being here today.

Anil Abrol:

Thank you very much for having me.

Issam Majeed:

Can you start by giving our listeners an overview of Eco Guardian, why it was established and how it came to be?

Anil Abrol:

Thank you very much. You're asking me a question my journey of the last 20 years or it was established. I'll take a step back and say who I am. Born and brought up in India, accountant by profession, making my way to the different countries while I was working. I was in Ireland in 1999 to 2004. At that time, Ireland was rated one of the most polluted countries in the Western Europe, and the major pollution was coming from the single-use plastic bags. I saw a transition happening in Ireland and then in other Western Europe. Ireland has put a levy on the use of single-use plastic bags were 15 euro cents at that time, and I have seen a transition happening in a span of one year, more than 98% of the single use plastic bags got eradicated from the Irish economy, and I witnessed that.

I was using those bags when I came to Canada in 2004, I saw that North America is still using single use plastic bags, and I was at a stage where I was trying to set up my own business. I had a long list of businesses which I wanted to do, but I wanted to make an impact. What I'm doing should have an impact on the economy and on the general public as a whole. So one day I was sitting in one of my friend's home office, and saw a single-use plastic bag lying on the corner of my friend's home office, and I say, "I found my business. We are going to reduce the consumption of single-use plastic bag from North America." All the youngsters, teenagers, they said great idea. And all the mature people said, "You are crazy. North America is not going to adopt that. They're not going to bring the reusable shopping bags to the market because they're used to getting the plastic or the paper bags."

And you see what happens today after 20 years, there are so many countries, there are so many cities which has banned our, we are banning the bags. So that is how this company was started. This was probably a vision to make a change, and we made a change. It was not easy. We started with some very large grocery chains, but it was very, very tough to get into some of the companies with a no man's company and with a totally new concept. But we started ground up and within a span of one, one and a half years, we had 100 customers from coast to coast selling the reusable shopping bags. So that is how it was started, and then everything has become a vision from a single use plastic bags, so say this is, if everybody has eight or 10 bags in their cars, then this is only going to be a replacement market. So that is how we started developing some new products in the field of compostable products, which we are very proud to say that Eco Guardian is the number one privately owned company in Canada which is selling the products coast to coast.

Issam Majeed:

Yeah, no, it's certainly a fantastic story for Eco Guardian and great to hear your perspective. Now let's take a step back and focus on the role of sustainable food packaging. Can you speak to the importance of the industry in an environmentally conscious society?

Anil Abrol:

Yeah, very interesting question. Everybody hears the news how much total plastic we use. There are more than 300 million tons of plastics that produce each year with a sustainable portion ending up in the oceans and landfills. 60% of the plastic goes in the food packaging. When the composting facilities are developed, 100% of the products can be composted. There are lots of renewable resources, raw materials are available such as the sugarcane waste, bamboo, which is a renewable crop. So the role of sustainable packaging going forward is going to be big. There are definitely lots of challenges. There are a lot of new, more innovation in the sustainable packaging needs to happen, but the future is very bright. When we started bringing the sustainable packaging way back in 2008, 2009, industry was just adopting it. Everybody was listening to the stories. Everybody was liking the products, but not many people were adopting it. Not many companies who are accepting those products.

Today, you see the trend. The styrofoam is non-existent in most of the food service places, and it is taken over by the compostable sustainable packaging. We are working more and more now with the food processing industries because they are looking for a change. I'm very proud to say that Eco Guardian was the winner of the Sobeys Sustainable Packaging Award, which they were trying to find a replacement for their meat trays, which is at the moment they're using as the styrofoam, and they selected Eco Guardian because we have provided them a solution which is sustainable packaging. So that is the future of the sustainable packaging is more and more corporations are looking for reducing their carbon footprints and how their packaging can become more sustainable as compared to the plastic, especially those plastics which cannot be recycled.

Issam Majeed:

Yes, absolutely. It's great to see how ingrained sustainable packaging has become in the corporate world and in society as a whole. How does Eco Guardian ensure the sustainability and integrity of its supply chain?

Anil Abrol:

At the moment, all of our products are produced in Asia, and we bring the products from Asia to Canada and USA and service coast to coast. During the Covid time, there were some challenges on the supply chain, which whole world has faced, not only Eco Guardian, but to overcome the supply chain issues, we are looking very seriously on producing our own products here in the Canadian market very soon. So this is something we are working on for the last few years. That will reduce the impact of some of the supply chain issues, but as far as I look at the Eco Guardian and the supply chain, this is one of the toughest things which a company like us has to do. We monitor our inventory, we monitor our customer's inventory, we keep sufficient inventory in our warehouses and guide our customers how much inventory they need to keep it to make sure that there's no impact of the supply chain.

So we work with large food processors, large retail stores, and once the product is not there on the retail stores shelves, they lose sales. So our field rate is more than 99% for the last many years. So that speaks of how well the supply chain gets managed by Eco Guardian.

Issam Majeed:

Yeah. Supply chain is certainly something a lot of Canadian businesses and companies have had to grapple with in recent years, but it's great to hear that Eco Guardian has been able to navigate through those challenges successfully. How does Eco Guardian handle the end-of-life cycle of its products to ensure they are effectively composted or recycled?

Anil Abrol:

Well, this is definitely one of the challenges. Everybody hears that only 4% or 5% of the plastic gets recycled. The composting is no different at the moment. There are not that many composting facilities are available, and whatever facilities are available at the moment, some of them do not accept the compostable products because there are different challenges. We are working through those challenges. We are working through the composting. We are attending composting conferences. We're understanding what the composting companies, their challenges are and how they can accept all the products which industry is bringing. The challenges are, it is very, very difficult to educate the consumer. How you educate a customer that a white products, which is made of sugarcane is going to the green bin and a white product made from the plastic is going to the recycling bin? So those type of educational challenges are difficult.

So the materials of both the products has to be same. Consumer education is required, but slowly and surely, consumers are demanding the sustainable products and packaging, and we are demanding from different authorities more and more products should get composted, and that is happening. There are more and more composting facilities are coming up, Canadian government is working, and there are other sectors which are working on the composting facilities. So I think it'll take some time, maybe three to five years, if not more, to have a lot of composting facilities available in Canada which can accept all the sustainable products so that whatever products that comes from the nature and goes back to the nature.

Issam Majeed:

Now, changing gears a little bit, what role do partnerships play in advancing Eco Guardian's mission and expanding its impact?

Anil Abrol:

Well, partnerships are very, very important, and that is what we do, and that is what we are proud of. We started a business with one of the healthcare customers way back in 2009, and we are partners since then. So we always had some challenges, but we come over those challenges and those are the partnerships which we create. I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day that the factory with whom we started way back in 2005, we are still working with them. We're going strong. So that is what, whether it is our customer or whether it is our vendor partners. So we work very closely with them and we create very strong partnerships with them. We help the customers what their needs are. That is how the partnerships gets created. We do not go to our customers and say, "Here is a product and [inaudible 00:11:52].

What we do is we go to the customer and say, "How can we make a difference in your sustainable initiatives, what your sustainable initiatives are? How can we design something for you? How can we re-engineer some of your packaging so that you reduce your number of SKUs so that you save some cost, although you might be paying a little bit more for the sustainable packaging, but if you're changing your size of your packaging or are reducing the cost somewhere else, not only for you, but even for the retailers, they're taking with a re-engineered package, you're taking a lesser space on the retailer's shelf." That helps. That is how we create the partnership. That is how we create the confidence and we work with customers and build our relationships and build our business with the customers or the vendors.

Issam Majeed:

Now getting into one of my favorite topics, what new products or innovations is Eco Guardian currently working on that listeners should be excited about?

Anil Abrol:

Well, what makes Eco different from the competitors or in general, we always keep on looking at different product lines. How we can make a difference, what is not happened yet in the industry, and then keep on creating a solution for that particular industry or that particular market segment. So food service has adopted the sustainable packaging. You go to a restaurant in three out of five restaurants, you will probably find that they're using a sustainable packaging, whether it's a compostable or a reusable or recyclable, but food processing has not yet adopted the sustainable packaging. So we are creating some innovative solutions, working with some of the large food processors and creating the solutions for the food processing where the products can remain in our trays for 13 months when it is frozen. So those kind of packaging we're trying to create. We are creating a solution for the meat industry, and we are working on some of the other products which I would not be able to disclose it at this minute. So hopefully you will see in the marketplace and on some of the social media channels very soon.

Issam Majeed:

Absolutely. Very much looking forward to and excited to seeing some of those products in the near future. That's actually a great transition to our last question here before we wrap. What is the vision for Eco Guardian moving forward and the future of sustainable food packaging?

Anil Abrol:

Well, I will start the future of the sustainable food packaging. As I mentioned earlier, 10 years back, the industry was using Styrofoam as a single-use, plastic, polystyrene, etc. Those things are getting banned by some of the cities, some of the countries. Definitely, we are seeing the Styrofoam and single-use polystyrene is not there in the system. So we see a very bright future for the sustainable packaging industry across the world. As far as Eco Guardian is concerned, as we mentioned, we claim ourselves to be the number one privately Canadian-owned company in the sustainable packaging field. We want to remain as number one in North America, and we want to expand our product portfolios either in the form of a distribution or in the form of the manufacturing to at least 20 countries in the next five years.

Issam Majeed:

That's very exciting. Anil, thank you for being here today and sharing Eco Guardian's important story and mission. To learn more about Eco Guardian, you can visit their website at ecoguardian.com. That's E-C-O-G-U-A-R-D-I-A-N.com. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Michael Torrance:

Thanks for listening to Sustainability Leaders. This podcast is presented by BMO. You can find our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Press the follow button if you want to get notified when new episodes are published. We value your input, so please leave a rating review and any feedback that you might have or visit us at bmo.com\sustainabilityleaders. Our show and resources are produced with support from BMO's Marketing Team and Puddle Creative. Until next time, thanks for listening and have a great week. For BMO disclosures, please visit BMOCM.com/podcast/disclaimer.