Aura, a consultancy dedicated to helping brands and retailers manage their packaging sustainability in real time, will open its doors at the Sustainability in Packaging Europe 2022 conference in November.
The new business brings together multi- disciplinary teams focused on delivering data-informed consulting to enable global businesses to make insight led decisions on materials, design, legislation, compliance and recyclability.
Aura, part of Sun Branding Solutions, is led by Greg Lawson as Managing Director and Gillian Garside-Wight as Consulting Director. The leadership is supported by Operations Director Sarah Kroon, Marketing Director Harriet Young as well as a team of experienced omni- channel retail consultants that will gather, check, manage and translate this data to extract the insights clients need to deliver and measure positive change.
Aura opens its doors with founding clients including the world’s biggest e-tailer, and the world’s biggest retailer.
Core to Aura’s offer is e-halo, its proprietary packaging sustainability platform. The e-halo platform provides real-time technical and sustainability packaging data that allows clients to track progress against their current targets and future roadmaps in a transparent way. e- halo sits at the top of a tech stack that also incorporates data flow, visualization and automation to ensure the right people have access to the right information at the right time, in one place.
As well as helping businesses make sense of their current offer, Aura’s team will ensure clients can futureproof ahead of upcoming developments in policy and practice, such as EPR in the UK. Aura offers horizon scanning services across 54 countries to advise on emerging regional and global trends that will feed into its clients’ longer-term strategic approaches.
Greg Lawson, Managing Director at Aura, said: “Our mission is to pioneer global change in packaging sustainability. Packaging is hugely complex and no two markets have the same standards on recyclability. We want to make packaging sustainability easier for businesses at a time when consumers and governments are demanding accountability. There are key EU, UK and US laws / bills rolling out in the next few years that will effect any brands and retailers doing business in those markets; other countries will be following suit. As such, regulatory and compliance issues now make it mission critical that brands and retailers are mitigating risk proactively.”
Gillian Garside-Wight, Consulting Director at Aura, added: “There’s still a long way to go before all the cogs turn in the same direction to create a true circular economy, which requires recycling infrastructures and packaging developed for sustainability to start working in harmony. However, we already have two of the biggest names in retail and e- commerce on our client list who are working with us because they proactively want to do the right thing.”
“This is a hugely positive sign that brands want to step up and set the standard for sustainability, rather than wait for legislation to catch up. There is still time to make a difference and we look forward to working with like-minded businesses that want to affect change on a global scale.”