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Versa Pak’s Growth Optimization Officer Eric Howard got his start in packaging as many new to the industry did in the 1990s: sweeping the floor. After a lucrative career as a professional skateboarder, Eric’s priorities shifted with a baby on the way. Packaging wasn’t the industry he imagined finding himself in, but after his first few months, he became intrigued with manufacturing and business strategy challenges and the potential to impact the market direction as packaging technology improved.
In his more than 28 years in the industry, Eric has worked for the “big five” in packaging. He’s been a technical director, a VP of sales, VP of technology, EVP of operations, company president, and more.
Now, as our Growth Optimization Officer for the last two years, Eric’s role is to help Versa Pak grow and expand into new markets. It’s a position that encompasses everything from mentoring executive leadership for aggressive company growth and identifying merger and acquisition opportunities to overseeing product development, reverse engineering, equipment acquisitions, technical market strategy, and national accounts management.
Navigating Packaging Industry Challenges
One of the biggest challenges Eric faces on a day to day basis is determining how existing Versa Pak products can be run on our customers’ systems. While we have the ability to customize polyethylene solutions, research and development significantly increases costs. It benefits everyone to work with an existing Versa Pak product as-is when possible.
Another challenge of his role is navigating ever-changing government regulations on the plastics industry. State bans on PFAS, for example, required Versa Pak to make a rapid pivot to PFAS-free polyethylene to continue shipping our products without disruption.
“It’s like doing ten years worth of work in months,” he said.
A large part of his job, Eric shared, is understanding geopolitical activism and educating others about the impact of materials. It’s no secret that plastics have gotten a bad rap in environmental discourse. What’s not widely known is the environmental impact of materials that have been positioned as alternatives to plastic.
“The worst kind of reusable bag on the planet is cotton,” he said. “It takes about 3,000 gallons of water to make one cotton bag, but it takes about a quarter of a gallon of water to make the same amount of plastic. Cotton takes 647% more electricity to produce versus its plastic equivalent.”
So what’s a plastics manufacturer to do?
Driving Innovation in Materials and Technology
Reducing our environmental impact comes down to advancing next-generation packaging – an area where Eric has established himself as an industry leader.
The approach is two-fold: improve the performance of bio-based plastics and identify new manufacturing technologies to push innovation even further.
For decades, he said, the trend in the industry was to reduce, reuse, and recycle. To reduce consumption, the packaging industry developed better resins that can run thinner material. But this created a problem for end users.
“Thinner is better for the environment,” Eric said. “It’s not better for making cereal bags.”
To address this challenge, Eric is currently leading an effort at Versa Pak to explore micro-voiding technology, which produces thicker polyethylene that weighs less than its thinner-gauged counterparts, and new manufacturing technologies that can produce plastics with higher levels of post-consumer and post-industrial recycled materials.
Related: How Versa Pak Reduces its Environmental Impact through Innovation
Leading the Way in Packaging
Eric has come a long way from his floor-sweeping days. He’s made a measurable impact on the industry with 13 patents. He’s started and sold multiple packaging companies. Now, he’s proud to have the chance to give back to the industry.
“The biggest accomplishment for me is to have the opportunity to be invited to council and mentor companies looking to grow exponentially,” he said.
For those looking to get their start in packaging, Eric advises that traditional education plays a smaller role in success than you might think.
“They’re going to need an insatiable appetite for learning the technology and embracing the savvy of people who’ve been in the industry a long time,” he said. “Anybody entering this industry is going to have let go of things they learned in education and embrace the phenomenon that is the making of films.”
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