2022 - Reflections

22 December 2022

By Karen Sherman, General Manager

Reflecting on 2022, this year has provided us all with a number of challenges & opportunities.

We relocated our offices to new commercial premises in a converted chapel in the nearby town of Melksham, bringing an end to full time working from home. This has proved to be a welcome move among the staff, improving morale & team spirit.

Throughout the year we have welcomed Isabel Groves, Sue Giles & Barry Nelson to further strengthen the team & have given James Glanville a new role as Sales Office Manager to drive our sales team forward.

Like everyone, we were deeply concerned about the situation in Ukraine, especially as we have colleagues in this area. Thankfully they are all safe so far & we continue to support them where we can.

We all faced the resulting challenges of spiralling costs which have had an impact on the cost of our products, making us rethink how we work for and with our customers, so that they are impacted as little as possible. In April, the introduction of the UK Plastic Packaging Tax further incentivised the use of more recycled material. We are pleased to share that we have a range of machine films, hand films & spiral wrap containing 30% PCR content, Our R&D Department continue to increase the range of recycled content products and to develop our fully sustainable Manunature range. In late 2022, we added RPET-15 to our tape range; manufactured using 85% recycled PET sourced from plastic bottles, reducing plastic consumption by 20% compared to RPET-19 (while also being PPT exempt too).

Our Parent Company in Germany announced a new partnership with Saica, creating an opportunity to take a greater step towards closed-loop recycling; while another new partnership with Polymateria also sees the potential to make our Manunature BD film a more available and viable alternative to traditional stretch films. For the first time since lockdown, teams from Manupackaging’s European locations met at our flagship production site in Schkopau. We were able to see the new cast production lines, discuss the development of our fully sustainable products and saw the latest stage in the building of our Manupackaging Forum. This exciting state of the art facility has been designed to offer both virtual and in-person technical testing and training opportunities for staff and customers.

2022 has been another year of challenges, but we have been impressed with how our dedicated team have dealt with these & overcome them. We have continued to deliver & support our customers in their quest to reduce plastic consumption & costs whilst ensuring the integrity of their products. We have some exciting new projects coming in 2023 & we look forward to sharing these with our customers old & new soon.

For now, I would like to thank everybody who has supported us throughout 2022 & I would like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a peaceful new year.