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Speaker interview with Monica Becker

60 seconds with the Director of Beauty, Personal Care and Household Products at Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute

Could you please share with our audience a quick snapshot about what you will be sharing during the panel discussion Session: “Safe, Circular & Responsible Cleaning: How Leading Household & Professional Cleaning Products Companies are Leveraging Cradle to Cradle Certified to Advance Sustainability”, along with speakers representing leading companies in the cleaning products sector such as Reckitt and Greenspeed?

I am excited to present this panel with representatives of Greenspeed and Reckitt, two companies that are leaders in the cleaning products sector, in advancing sustainability and are highly engaged with Cradle to Cradle (C2C) Certified. In this session we will have the opportunity to learn how Greenspeed – a professional and household products company based in the Netherlands – has been advancing the sustainability of their formulations, microfibre cleaning cloths, packaging, cleaning equipment, and their manufacturing processes; and how they have leveraged C2C Certified to support their innovation and optimization efforts over the last seven years. Reckitt will share details on their comprehensive corporate and product-specific sustainability initiatives, why they have recently started their engagement with C2C Certified, and their ambitions for certification.

Describe how Cradle to Cradle Certified helps companies advance their circularity initiatives? What are your recommendations for companies to meet today’s consumer demands?

Given consumer awareness and concern about packaging waste and plastic pollution, sustainability attributes of packaging have become a more visible signal to consumers that they are buying a sustainable product. We recommend and recognize a range of circularity strategies and achievements for packaging including light-weighting, high levels of post-consumer recycled content, responsibly sourced renewable material content, designing packaging to be recycled or composted in recovery systems available to consumers where products are sold, and convenient and safe ways to refill and reuse packaging. Companies that certify their products with C2C have to demonstrate that their packaging is both safe, i.e., the materials do not contain chemicals of concern, and has circularity attributes. But companies can also certify their packaging separately, and at the Gold level, companies have to demonstrate high levels of circularity achievement. The C2C Certified Gold mono-material stand-up refill pouch, developed through a partnership between Werner & Mertz and Mondi, is a great example of this.

What are the session topics/themes you will enjoy most at Cleaning Products Europe 2022 in Prague?

I studied the agenda carefully to try to answer this question and I expect that I will enjoy all the sessions, and find each one interesting and useful. My work is focused on sustainability and so many of the sessions address this topic, but I tend to be interested in learning new things outside my day-to-day focus as well. For example, the session – DIY4U - Integrating Digital and Physical Technologies to enable Personalisation and Make-on-Demand – is not a topic I am familiar with but I look forward to learning about it. I am also quite excited to hear from the panelists at the end of day 2 – The Next Generation Leaders in the Cleaning Products Sector.