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I’m back from a lovely vacation in time to drop this insightful interview with Dan Peragine from Berry Plastics. I had Deciphr.ai break it all down below the sponsor information, but here are a few quick links from the show:
Meyers Sustainable Packaging Guide eBook
Sponsor information!
If you listened to the podcast and wanted to connect with Specright to rid the world of waste. Let’s go! www.specright.com/pkg. Prepare your company for the world of EPR laws and be the sustainability hero! Make sure you check them out and join them on their mission to have a world where people are free to make amazing things!
Also…
If you need contract-to-hire support, or you are looking to hire directly for industry professionals…. Spark Packaging can help. Spark Packaging is the industry partner who provides all your recruitment and staffing needs.
If you are hearing this…and thinking “THAT’S ME”…You need to go to to SparkPackagingINC.com/HIRING , again that is SparkPackagingINC.com/HIRING and answer some of their questions. Once received a Spark team-member will reach out A-S-A-P! Tell them the Packaging Pastor sent ya!
This podcast is part of a great network of podcasts about packaging. Go follow Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors along with Packaging Unbox’d hosted by Evelio Mattos.
If you want to be a guest on this podcast, or Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors OR Packaging Unbox’d with Evelio, go to www.encasemedia.com and fill out an application for one or all!
Summary/Abstract
Dan Peregene is a territory sales manager and sales onboarding and training specialist for Barry Global (formerly Barry Plastics). Dan was a radio host before this, and in this interview he discusses his journey from radio broadcasting to working in the packaging industry. Dan explains that he always wanted to be a baseball player, but after high school he realized it wouldn't be a possibility. He then decided to pursue communications and as a child he used to use karaoke machines and cassettes. Dan then reached out to the host of the interview, and the host was surprised to see a list of segments sent in. Dan explains that he still likes to call Barry Plastics by the old name, Barry Global. Overall, the interview is about how Dan got from radio broadcasting to the packaging industry. The speaker and the interviewer discussed their respective college experiences. The speaker had a major in radio broadcasting and ran a radio station called WRFC. The interviewer was a baseball fan and asked the speaker who his favorite player was growing up. The speaker revealed his favorite player was Mike Piazza of the New York Mets. The interviewer then shared his own sports background, mentioning he was a fan of the San Francisco Giants and their Blake Street Bombers in the late 80s and early 90s. The speaker concluded the conversation by wishing the interviewer luck with golf, which was now his favorite sport. The speaker talks about how he got his start in radio broadcasting. After graduating college, he was hired by AEP Industries for an inside sales position in their custom films division. He quickly realized he wanted to get into radio, and had some pending offers when he decided to work his way up. He learned a lot in the custom films division and was eventually able to make the transition to radio broadcasting. The conversation between the two individuals centered around the journey of one of them from graduating college in December 2002, to working the night shift at Walgreens, to then being in outside sales for AP from 2013 until mid-2016. It was then announced that Barry was going to be acquiring AEP, which was a distributor for AEP Machine and Hand stretch Filmed. This acquisition ended up bringing a lot of synergies together and was quite impressive with the amount of product lines available.
Timestamps
0:00:00
Interview with Dan Peregene: From Radio Host to Territory Sales Manager at Barry Global
0:02:34
Heading: Reflections on College Radio Broadcasting and Sports Heroes
0:06:53
Heading: AEP Industries Inside Sales Position: A Unique Story of Transitioning to On-Air Talent
0:08:52
Conversation Summary: Exploring Packaging and AEP Machine and Hand Stretch Film Distribution
0:10:43
Heading: Exploring the Benefits of Shrink Bundling Film with Barry Global Territory Sales Manager
0:14:23
Heading: Exploring the Benefits of Shrink Film in 2023
0:16:09
"Exploring the Benefits of Polyethylene Packaging with Barry Packaging"
0:23:25
Exploring Solutions to Reduce Carbon Emissions Through Plastic Packaging
0:25:14
Conversation with Dan Kostka, Senior Technical Sales Representative at Cox Polymers
0:27:23
Interview with Daniel Peregin, Packaging Industry Expert and Author of the 2022 Impact Report
Highlights
We're just there to pick up the package and get it from point A to point B. But with Cox, that allows that film to get more in strength and that allows opportunities to get that material reduction in place at that point. Because lighter weight, if you look at the Impact 2025, which a lot of companies are trying to pursue and get to PCR is obviously big on there, right? Post consumer recycled material where we're taking items that are now basically being reused again into the film. They're busted down into raw resins and then being reprocessed back into the film. But another thing is being able to reduce the amount of material that it takes to wrap the package.
There's a lot of good things going on in plastic packaging. A lot of good things. And over the years, what's become a popular thing is co extruded films. And let me touch base with that. You got your monolayer structures and your coax structures, and with co extrusion structures, you could put multilayers into the film. If you and I are trying to see a package, we're never going to know it's a coax film or a monolayer film.
Lot of the trends. Like, I have people who comment on TikTok and on LinkedIn and whatnot and people are really good about pointing out problems, but not with proposing solutions that would be better than what they think, right? And so I think plastic and especially things like stretch film and bundling shrink and that kind of stuff, that's very functional, but provides a function that can also contribute to being part of reduction in carbon emissions along with circularity.
And the company purchased, I think, almost 28% of recycled or increased their purchasing of recycled content. And if you take a look at the overall whole, 79% of reusable is in the packaging. So it's quite impressive. So I would definitely recommend everybody taking a look at that Impact 2022 Report. I would say, Adam, one of the things that I find most interesting is the processes of manufacturing into this with plastic packaging and maybe some fun facts that people really didn't know about it. But one of the fun facts about plastic packaging is that in terms of what we're and this is just Barry as a whole, this is Shrink Film and our consumer packaging division, your Health and Hygiene division, there's an abundance of it. But with plastics we found it took about six times less water usage to produce products, two times less with energy and two times less with greenhouse emissions. So it's quite impressive when people see this and I think it's really enlightening to really read on. So I would recommend people taking a look at that. It's available on the website, no doubt.
And one of the things that kind of struck me was interesting is that Barry was able to, according to the study, achieve 1% product weight reduction. And you think of 1% as being a small number, but when you're shipping hundreds of thousands of pounds a day, or if not more, I mean, that's a big number. When you add throughout the whole year, that's a significant number. Billion pounds of that is 10 million pounds of material that's not there anymore. So it is quite impressive.