My first week at Aura has been nothing less than hugely informative. I spent time familiarising myself with e-halo, our proprietary software, which is already utilised by the world’s leading retailer and e-tailer.
I feel a strong sense of satisfaction when I can support businesses in understanding a complex matter. At Valpak, I helped businesses understand their obligations under the various producer compliance legislations and, at Biffa, I assisted businesses in understanding the value in their waste and the steps that they could take to maximise it.
With packaging sustainability, I feel that the key challenge for businesses is in obtaining and understanding data.
This is a challenge in all industries, of that I’m keenly aware, but in only a week, I met with a range of businesses who all expressed the same frustration to me: “We wish we had more accurate data.” This means no average weights and no guesstimates. They wanted one truth. Pure data.
I suppose it should come as no surprise therefore that Stylus, an expert source for trends and insights, reported on e-halo’s unique capabilities in their recent sustainability round up. As someone that is just discovering e-halo, I was impressed by its ability to calculate insights on packaging recyclability in real-time. There was no mucking about in the background to force it to produce an answer. It just did it.
On my first day at Aura, we met with one of the UK’s leading grocery retailers. Their packaging team asked several questions that got to the heart of the matter. Does it archive every change ever made to a bill of materials? Can I update those bills of material en masse? Are the regulatory rules and guidance updated for us? Are the reports customizable?
The answer to the questions is a resounding yes. e-halo delivers on a retailer’s key requirements.
My teammates told me that its all about managing sustainability every day. Maybe it isn’t so complex after all.