Dr. Robert Reiche (*1981) studied food technology and received his doctorate on the topic of “Information logistics in value chains of the agricultural and food industry” in 2011.
After his post-doc period at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics and the Bonn FoodNetCenter, he took on the role of IT project manager at Euro Pool System, the European market leader for reusable transport packaging. In his nine years at the Euro Pool Group (Holding), he built up the digital innovation management at the international level of the Euro Pool Group. During this time, many innovative solutions were developed to make reusable packaging easier and faster to return, to document cleaning and disinfection processes and to make reusable packaging part of the Internet of Things. He represented the Euro Pool Group in various European research projects (FP7 - Horizon 2020). He is the author of various publications in the cross-sectional area between food hygiene, reusable transport packaging and digitization. Since 2020, Dr. Reiche has been working as a Managing Consultant at CONET Solutions GmbH in Bonn and is a consultant and expert for digitization in the circular economy of (reusable) packaging and leads industrial projects in this field.
Lecture summary:
Reducing the impacts of climate change presents complex challenges at international, national and local levels.
Reducing waste and using limited resources carefully starts locally. The transition away from disposable packaging and towards the widespread use of reusable packaging is a collective task that requires a structured approach. Municipalities, society, local companies and suppliers of reusable items must work together to take good first steps. In the "Reusable Model City" project, an approach was piloted that addresses many aspects of a necessary transformation. In the presentation, these approaches will be shown and discussed in relation to return logistics, food hygiene, billing and compensation models from the "Reusable Model City" pilot project.