AkzoNobel Industrial Coatings establishes fresh sustainable innovation team to bolster sustainability goals
AkzoNobel has created a new sustainable innovation team for industrial coatings to support and drive sustainability across its diverse portfolio, including packaging coatings, coil and extrusion coatings, wood finishes and wood adhesives.
Tessa Slagter will lead the initiative as sustainable innovation manager. She is joined by Ana Sanséau-Blanchard as sustainable product manager and Kyra Boschma as sustainability analyst. The three will work with all segments and regions of the industrial coatings business to strengthen and align capabilities and give AkzoNobel the best chance of achieving its sustainability targets.
The team will also be supporting canmakers to make a material difference in reducing their carbon emissions and achieve their own sustainability targets.
In 2021, AkzoNobel announced an ambitious target of reducing carbon emissions across its full value chain, which includes customers and suppliers, by 50% (absolute) by 2030, taking 2018 as its baseline. This ambition, which is aligned with the Paris Agreement, aiming to limit climate change and ensuring the global temperature doesn’t rise more than 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels, has also been approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
Chris Bradford, industrial coatings marketing director at AkzoNobel, says that reducing carbon emissions across the full value chain is imperative: “Whilst we continue to look closely at sustainability in developing our own new coating technologies and in sourcing raw materials, we also know that a significant amount of emissions are in our customers’ application and curing processes, solvent emissions, and end of life.
“We know our new low carbon coatings and application technologies can decrease a customer’s carbon footprint, but we recognise that changes to their processes can be costly. Our new sustainable innovation team will help bring our low carbon products, customer processes and business models together to make meaningful and collaborative progress.”
This sustainable innovation team will engage with customers, as well as trade and industry bodies to deliver the sustainability strategy for the industrial coatings business unit. They will also be responsible for carbon reduction progress reports, and sustainable innovation across the service and solution portfolio.
Tessa Slagter has been with AkzoNobel since 2019, moving over from the decorative paints marketing team. She holds a masters degree in innovation management with a specialisation in sustainability and has a track record in B2B marketing and sustainability in the (recycled) plastics and coatings industry. She was the first chair of the NextGen Sustainability Council of AkzoNobel – leading a team of 12 future leaders.
Sanséau-Blanchard joined AkzoNobel in 2010, working on the development of low VOC coatings for the global marine and protective coatings market and then became a technical specialist focusing on marine, protective and yacht product sustainability, where she has been managing environmental impact, lifecycle analysis and carbon footprint reporting. She also actively participates in the British Coatings Federation and the AkzoNobel NextGen Sustainability Council.
Boschma has been an R&D Specialist with AkzoNobel’s Woodcare team in Sassenheim since 2022. Prior to this she worked in the Eurofins lab, and as a test engineer at Kesem Health.
