On February 21st, 2000, I was moderating a panel discussion in Stockholm and the theme was: The IT society, a threat against printing paper?

“You can’t see the forest for all the trees”. In Sweden, with some 80 percent of the land covered by forests, that is a pretty obvious remark. But it is also a Swedish proverb, meaning that it’s hard to see what’s under your nose.

There are many people who have been part of Opticom’s history and have been valuable in contributing to our success. Our roots stem from research and analysis, which has provided our clients with true customer knowledge. This knowledge has served as the foundation for decisions that aim at creating bottom line value for our customers across the industry.

Take a closer look at the cardboard box that you just opened, or the newspaper you finished reading, or the bag of toilet tissue you recently bought. In an earlier life, they all used to be trees. Or rather, the cellulose fibres these products are made of used to be trees. But since then, the fibres have made a long journey.

You probably don’t have the faintest idea. But it is an important question to ask. Not only for you, but the entire globe. Think about how much you care about the food you eat. You ask questions, such as were the hens happy laying the eggs? Did the cows eat well? Are the carrots grown organically? Or did the peas get sprinkled with pesticides? It’s also become more important to know about the entire value chain, if the products come from a farm nearby, or have they been flown across the globe?

Now here’s a challenging line of thought. We know that polymer materials, commonly known as micro plastics, are literarily flooding our oceans, endangering numerous species. Almost all of these micro pieces of plastics come from discarded packaging; bags, cartons, bottles, trays, wraps, blisters, you name it. To make things worse, the absolute majority of these packaging stem from fossil oil. So, they don’t only kill fish, they contribute to climate change.

Over the years, Opticom has conducted extensive research on buying behavior among customers in the pulp and paper industry. In particular, our Brand Equity surveys have demonstrated the complexity of the paper buying market and the consequently difficult task of segmenting the customers into distinct and easily manageable marketing categories.

Digital technologies are contributing to rapid and fundamental changes in almost every aspect of our daily lives and this trend shows no sign of slowing down, not least within the healthcare sector which has seen a significant acceleration towards digital transformation since the pandemic began. As a result, venture capital funding for digital health companies in 2021 was a record $46.6 billion.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in getting advanced drug therapies and vaccines to patients in need has nothing to do with funding, research, or a lack of participants in trials — but the actual packaging of the pharma product. There are many boxes to tick when choosing the most appropriate packaging: including preservation of therapeutic effects, ensuring global supply with minimal environmental impact, avoiding counterfeit, using best chain-of-custody, among others.

"The permanent struggle for optimizations is surely one of the most significant cultural principles operative in contemporary Western societies. If we do not want to be left stranded by a species of modern living dominated by acceleration and competition, we have no choice but to play our part in the incessant performance priming and productivity boosting, the relentless pursuit of self-enhancement and the ubiquity of the multi-tasking phenomenon in all walks of life."