Gabriel Ivan, CHEP Romania: “We need to work together to decouple the increase in welfare from the increase in resource consumption”

“I am very proud to work for a company like CHEP and we have helped a lot of other companies to become more sustainable. What can we do or what can companies do to manage these limited resources? We can use them together, we can repair them or we can manage them in such a way that more participants in the economy benefit from them.

In Romania we are known for our blue pallets, but we do much more than that. We are involved in sustainability projects, food bank, etc. We have a collaboration with Auchan and in the last 7-8 years we have managed to eliminate many situations in which food trucks run empty or half empty,” Gabriel Ivan, Country General Manager, CHEP Romania & Bulgaria said during Sustainability Forum 2022 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“We use the synergies not only with the big retailers in Romania, but we also use them with the big producers.

In the last 10 years, through our collaboration with retailers and manufacturers, we have managed to avoid CO2 emissions equivalent to a truck that orbits the Earth 2700 times.

Another example to understand the impact on the circular economy is by collaborating in our circular system, using 24 pallets in our system and returning to our system saves a mature tree from being cut down.

I am glad to see that more and more companies are concerned about the circular economy and maybe for the first time I see a concern from the authorities. We still have a lot to do because in our area the circular economy has long been confused with the recycling part. Recycling is a valuable component of us, but it has become less valuable since the 2000s when we began to understand that for every percentage increase in welfare we need to consume at least 0.4-0.5% of additional resources.

We need to see how we can work together to decouple this increase in welfare from the increase in resource consumption. This can be done very easily through collaboration.

Digitization plays an important role in bringing sustainable initiatives into the century in which we live. It helps us to understand the flows, the potential synergies in efficiency and to reach the point where our partners are 100% focused on their business, and we take over everything that means the management of this activity related to supply chain and logistics.”

Full recording of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5TZ1M3tQnY