One team, multiple disciplines / Anne van Seters

Anne van Seters: packaging expert, creator of Packstract

25 years of packaging experience, from material development to machine building. In recent years focused on one question: how do companies really get their packaging data in order?

Background

Anne has spent his entire working life in packaging: material development, packaging development, machine development, investment projects. The last eight years focused on sustainable packaging, including at the Kennisinstituut Duurzaam Verpakken (the Dutch Knowledge Institute for Sustainable Packaging), where he worked on recyclability checks for rigid and flexible plastic packaging.

In late 2019 he started his first major data project: together with students from three universities of applied sciences, around 1,500 packages were completely taken apart, weighed and analyzed for material composition. The figures were linked to market data, to see how much and which material actually reaches the market. That research eventually landed at Verpact (at the time called Afvalfonds), where Anne continued to guide the data research.

Why Packstract

During workshops on recyclability checks, Anne kept hearing companies say the same thing: "that's going to be complicated." What seemed simple in theory (just pull up your packaging records) turned out to be an obstacle for most organizations in practice. That was the starting point for the idea behind Packstract: really helping companies know and use their packaging data.

The idea only really gained momentum once AI came more into view. Driving in the car, listening to a program about language models, Anne wondered: why would you need millions of sources, if you could build a model specifically for packaging? Similar to an accounting system that processes invoices automatically without you having to look up a VAT rate yourself. Why couldn't that work for packaging documents too?

Through his children's schoolyard, Anne got in touch with two parents who both worked in IT. They were immediately enthusiastic about the idea. That's how Packstract came to be.