Ashok Chaturvedi receives The Economic Times Polymers Lifetime Award 2018

Chaturvedi is a first generation entrepreneur and founder of the Uflex Group. Under his leadership, the group has evolved to become India’s largest fully integrated multinational flexible packaging materials and solution company offering packaging films (BOPP, BOPET, CPP, metallised and other speciality films); packaging products like laminates (roll form), pre-formed pouches, flexi-tubes, big bags; packaging and converting machines; inks, adhesives, coatings & polyols; elastomers and sleeves, rotogravure printing cylinders; flexo-polymer plates and anti-counterfeiting and brand protection solutions that prevent look-alikes from eroding the brand equity of clients.

The Economic Times Polymers Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 was given away at a formal ceremony held in Mumbai on 7 March 2018. The who’s who from the Indian plastics, polymers and packaging industry had congregated for the award ceremony.

Making a strong pitch for plastics, polymers and packaging industry, Chaturvedi, in his acceptance speech, said, “Plastics in all forms, whether single layered; multi-layered or mixed are recyclable/ reprocessable and can be put to viable end-of-life use. We at our manufacturing plants have been successfully demonstrating how polymeric/ packaging waste can be efficiently reprocessed. Research at International scale has proven beyond reasonable doubt that flexible packaging requires much less energy than its rigid counterpart like metals, glass etc throughout all the three critical phases of its life-cycle, manufacturing, transportation and disposal. Our commitment and efforts towards sustainable business processes and products date back to several decades much before carbon footprint neutralisation and sustainability became global concerns. In 1995 at Recycle ’95 Davos Global Forum, Uflex was conferred with the Best Paper Award as a testament to its unrelenting work towards recycling and packaging sustainability.”

Notably, Chaturvedi is credited for the introduction of small sachets or unit packs for mouth fresheners, candies, tomato ketchup, shampoos, etc to make them affordable and well within the reach of the common man back in the eighties.

Under his aegis, Uflex today has state-of-the-art flexible packaging material manufacturing facilities at multiple locations in India with installed capacity of around 100,000 TPA and packaging film manufacturing facilities at strategic locations across the world with cumulative installed capacity in excess of 337,000 TPA at India, UAE, Poland, Egypt, Mexico & USA with the products enjoying a formidable market presence in over 140 countries across the globe.

Recently, under Chaturvedi’s leadership, Uflex has setup first of its kind state-of-the-art aseptic liquid packaging material manufacturing plant at Sanand in Gujarat for products like milk, dairy derivatives, juices, other non-aerated energy drinks and distilled beverages. The annual production capacity of this plant is 7 billion packs. The Sanand project re-affirms the company’s commitment towards government’s Make in India initiative.

With this, Uflex has completed its entire product bouquet that now spans across end-to-end flexible packaging solutions for solids, semi solids, non-aerated liquids, pastes, gels, viscous fluids, powders and granular materials.