“Saubermacher Will Be a Network Aggregator During the Transition.”

We are already seeing very clear trends to this end: increasingly in France materials are no longer being handed over to waste management, but instead they remain the property of either specific companies or are systems bundled by companies. In Austria we have the ARA, and Germany has the Green Dot. These are systems that find optimal recycling solutions on behalf of the distributors of the products.

In the past, the focus was on a quota: X-amount must be collected and recycled. That has now changed considerably: Today, beverage producers, for example, want their material back, e.g. PET bottles, and they want it qualitatively processed so that they can use it for the next life cycle.  In France, this has already gone much further. In the case of furniture or textiles, waste management never reacquires the concept of ownership. Rather, as a partner of industry, it helps to keep the cycle going. 

As specialists in logistics and in processing these material flows, this is not a huge challenge for Saubermacher, but we must learn to integrate ourselves into these networks and to think in a larger-scale industrial way.

Spari: What will Saubermacher AG look like in 5 to 10 years?

Mittermayr: That’s a good question. How long do these change processes take? My experience is that they usually take much longer than you think, but not always! There’s a huge dynamic in our industry so I think we will see both, and Saubermacher will have a strong role as an industry partner and as a partner to the big companies during this transition.

Saubermacher will grow as it continues to absorb and integrate smaller companies. Today we have 76 holdings, and this will continue to grow because smaller, often family-owned, companies will no longer be able to cope with the flood of future requirements.

We are specifically driven by legislation, very strongly by the CSRD and by the EU taxonomy. Non-financial reporting means nothing other than that large companies, which have waste streams due to their business activities, need a partner who will report back on the real, genuine CO2 content that takes place in the processing of their waste and show them ways to improve.  In Austria, probably only a handful of companies will be subject to this EU taxonomy, so how is a company with 12 employees, which is not subject to this system itself, supposed to provide a company with data suitable for auditing? Saubermacher will therefore be a network aggregator that aggregates resources that are needed in the industry.

Spari: The European circular economy package provides for digitalisation as a key measure by 2030. Digital technologies such as censoring, Internet of Things, or blockchain are seen as the essential building blocks of waste and recycling management for industry and commerce. The adaptation to new business models, for example for sustainable recyclables management, leads to a sometimes-radical change in the risk landscape.  What risk management measures is Saubermacher taking to anticipate and manage future risks arising from these changes and innovations, so you are prepared for changing risk potentials or threat scenarios?

Mittermayr: The biggest risk in all these developments is that you don’t know when and how they will occur, or in what form. We talk about this thoroughly in our strategy meetings. Once a year, the entire strategy is adapted in an iterative procedure – including the existing guard rails. Every few years we also review these guard rails. For the most part, we do this by developing theories and assessing their opportunities and risks and how likely they are to occur. We also consider counter-theories to these hypotheses and their impact. 

We have an expert panel who undertakes these deliberations consisting of top managers who have been in the business for many years, top young talent who are simply socialised differently and see the world differently and perceive trends differently, and middle management. To date this expert team combined with our risk management approach of strategy, forming thesis, and falsifications, hasn’t let us down and we’ve had most things on the radar.