Hello Anders Svensson, new Chair of the Board at NPA

How do you view NPA’s role in the system?

– NPA has a very significant and important role in supporting its approximately 12,000 affiliated producers with guidance and in helping them meet their growing producer responsibility through effective solutions for collection and recycling. NPA also needs to continue working closely with legislators and authorities to ensure clear and relevant regulations for a well-functioning producer responsibility system.

What action is most important for producer responsibility to help Sweden achieve its recycling targets?

– Right now, it is ensuring that all households have access to kerb side collection and that this leads to increased collection of high-quality material, enabling a higher material recycling rate.

In the slightly longer term, taking responsibility and collaborating across the entire value chain – from packaging developers to households, businesses, municipalities and recyclers – is more important than any single action.

What makes a good packaging, in your view?

– It should preserve and protect the product, be efficient from a production and logistics perspective, be functional and easy to use, look good on the shelf, and at the same time be possible to reuse or recycle. All of these functions need to be in place; if one of them falls short, it is not a good package.

What is needed for packaging to be treated as a valuable resource in a circular society?

– For packaging to become a valuable resource, more people need to sort at source, producers need to develop packaging that can be reused or recycled, and the recycling industry needs the right conditions. A functioning market for recycled material is also required.

PPWR is just around the corner — what are your hopes for the new legislation?

– PPWR is a new regulation to me, but generally speaking, it means greater and more detailed responsibility for those who place packaging on markets within the EU. My hope is that it will lead to a shared understanding among all parties of how the legislation should be implemented, so that we achieve harmonised regulation.