A warm welcome to packaging and connected products company, r-pac, as it joins the Products of Change Membership Community.

We heard from Güneri Tugcu, global director partnerships & ecosystem, r-pac, in this Q&A to find out more about what r-pac has been working on, its role in digital product passports (DPPs) and what it is looking to get out of the POC Community.

1. Tell me a bit about what you do

r-pac has been a world leader in trims, labels, hangtags and packaging that end up on apparel, footwear and consumer goods for over 35 years. We are around 6,000 people across 30 or so countries, working as a tier 2 supplier for the brands and licensees people would recognise.

CNCT is r-pac’s connected products division, the solutions layer that digitises our customers’ products with unique identities and provides value added solutions to get the most out of those IDs. DekoGraphics is r-pac’s embellishments division for the team sports, music and entertainment verticals.

My own role sits across all three, running strategic partnerships and the partner ecosystem. No single company covers everything a connected product needs, from material impact data through authentication to resale, so the job is building and running the network of specialists around us. I came to it through about 25 years in print and packaging production, brand protection and serialisation, including a spell at Amazon working on their Transparency programme.

2. What does sustainability mean to you?

For r-pac, it comes down to evidence rather than claims. We have spent decades on product identity, and the thing that shapes our view is that you cannot verify what you cannot identify. A sustainability statement at brand level is a promise. The same statement attached to an individual item, with the data behind it, is something a consumer or a regulator can actually check. That shift from assertion to evidence is where we think the industry is heading, and it is what our business is built around.

It also has to be commercially viable. We sit deep in the supply chain and see what happens when sustainability is treated purely as a cost centre, which is that it does not survive a difficult year. The work that lasts is the work that pays for itself.

3. Why have you joined POC?

Our US team works closely with brand, entertainment, sports and music licensing, and POC is where that part of the industry is doing the practical work rather than talking about it. As a vendor partner we are usually not in the room when the brands are making the decisions, so being in a place where we can share our expertise and experience with licensors, retailers and brand owners directly is worth considerably more to us than another conference.

4. What would you like to get out of POC membership?

Mainly to listen, at least to begin with, and the Working Groups are the part we are most interested in. We also know a fair amount about Digital Product Passports and the EU regulatory timeline, which seems to be an area where a lot of members know something is coming without knowing the detail, so if that is useful to the community we are glad to share it. And to find partners, because our model depends on working with specialists who do things we do not.

5. Sustainability achievements so far?

Our contribution is largely about making other people’s sustainability work provable at scale. r-pac is an official member of CIRPASS-2, the EU project shaping how the Digital Product Passport will actually function, and is active in several of its workgroups. We also sit on GS1 standards workgroups across the US, UK and Germany as well as the RAIN Alliance board, which is where the technical groundwork for product-level data is being laid.

Alongside that we have built a partner ecosystem covering environmental impact assessment, supply chain traceability, authentication and circularity, so that a product’s footprint and origin can be attached to the item itself rather than living in a report. In practice, because we manage the birth of the digital ID and are involved in so many parts of the supply chain, the brands we work with can put verifiable material, origin and impact data into a consumer’s hand through a scan of the product. We have been helping brands, licensees and their vendor communities do this for years.

6. Sustainability ambitions?

To push this beyond compliance. The Digital Product Passport is arriving as an obligation, and most early work will be about meeting it at the lowest possible cost, which is understandable but wastes the opportunity.

The same identity that satisfies a regulator can route a product to resale or recycling at end of first life, prove authenticity in a secondhand market, and tell a brand what happens to its products after they are sold. Our ambition is that the passport is still doing useful work years after the sale rather than being a compliance artefact nobody opens. Given that we manufacture the carrier at source, we are in an unusually good position to make that the default rather than the exception.

7. Thoughts on sustainability in the packaging industry, challenges and opportunities?

The biggest challenge is fragmentation. Data sits in different places, in different formats, held by different suppliers, and nobody owns the whole picture. The result is that claims move faster than evidence, which is bad for everyone including the brands doing it properly. Cost is the other, because sustainability improvements usually land on the supplier first while the benefit shows up somewhere else entirely.

The opportunity is that regulation is finally forcing a common structure, and packaging turns out to be where it lands. The label, the tag and the pack are what physically carry product identity, so the least glamorous part of the product becomes the interface to everything else: compliance data, consumer engagement, resale, recycling. For an industry usually treated as a cost line, that is a real shift, and it is the one we are betting on.

Personally, having spent 25 years in this industry, I find that genuinely satisfying. The unglamorous end of the business turns out to be where a lot of this gets decided.