At Avery Dennison, Innovation Is Built on Problem Solving and Collaboration

David Collins, vice president and general manager for Avery Dennison Performance Tapes, discusses the company's 2024 milestones, sustainability strategy, and how innovation and collaboration are driving the future.

By Karen Parker, Editor-in-Chief, ASI

Avery Dennison is a global materials science and manufacturing company known for its expertise in labeling, packaging materials, and functional adhesives. With operations in over 50 countries, the company serves diverse industries including retail, logistics, healthcare, and automotive. Avery Dennison’s Performance Tapes division is particularly focused on delivering high-performance bonding solutions used in everything from electronics to construction. The company is also recognized for its sustainability initiatives and its forward-looking approach to digital transformation and product innovation.

In a recent interview with ASI, David Collins, vice president and general manager for Avery Dennison Performance Tapes, discussed key 2024 achievements, including new product portfolios focused on energy storage and building and construction. He emphasized a broader view of sustainability that balances recyclable and bio-based adhesives with solutions that enhance product longevity and energy efficiency. Collins noted the growing role of AI across the company in areas like operations planning and safety, though full integration is still developing. Looking ahead, he identified major trends such as solvent-free adhesives, labor-reducing solutions like tapes in construction, and customer-driven innovation as central to shaping the industry's future.

ASI: Reflecting on 2024, what were the most significant milestones or achievements for Avery Dennison, particularly within the adhesives and tape segments?

David Collins: 2024 was a great year for us. We were able to accomplish many of our goals. We launched several new portfolios, focused on energy storage, building, and construction. We continued that along into some updates in our portfolios around energy management with solar and charging stations. We continue to invest significantly in new adhesives and adhesive technology, making sure that we are providing our customers with the latest and greatest that's available so we can provide it to them.

ASI: Sustainability continues to be a top priority in packaging. What progress did Avery Dennison make toward its sustainability goals last year, especially regarding recyclable or bio-based adhesives?

Collins: I think there are a couple of different ways that we look at it. First of all: always looking for adhesives that have the ability to be recycled or be removed over time that allow whatever they're bonded to be recycled. There is also a big portion of what we work on that is simply durability and longevity. And thinking about different spaces, we can use building and construction as an example, where cooperating with someone to try and find a solution that lasts 15 years versus 10 years, and the tape is the conduit to deliver that, inherently provides sustainability. Trying to manage airflow using building and construction again is an example, trying to manage and prevent air leakage out of a home where you can reduce the amount of natural gas or electricity used is another way to look at it. So, while bio-based adhesives are interesting and we certainly are aware of them, when it comes down to it, is the benefit in a bio-based adhesive? Or is the benefit in longevity and durability of a product or having other sustainable benefits in the space that we are looking at? So, it is a little bit more of a complex piece, because bio-based adhesives are still underway from a development standpoint to be able to perform to meet some of those other sustainable benefits. We look on both sides of that and obviously partner with our customers on their individual needs. And then obviously looking through Scope One, Two, and Three with them as well — we’ll call it just a carbon footprint standpoint — and making sure that we're continuing to move the story forward and being conscientious about being a more sustainable company.

ASI: How is Avery Dennison currently leveraging AI within its business, and how do you envision AI impacting how you do business in the future?

Collins: I think AI is a very interesting tool. I can say across Avery Dennison as a whole, there is certainly a lot of work being done in AI. Speaking more specifically for our tapes business, certainly we continue to look to find ways to leverage it and are leveraging it today, whether it's content creation, taking notes from meetings, to supply chain planning and operations planning. There is a lot of utility in it so far. But it's individuals utilizing that utility versus it being a front-to-back-end solution that we've completely implemented within our tapes business. The nice thing about being part of a large organization is that you do get exposure to a lot of the capabilities and innovation that are happening, that we can deploy within our individual divisions within Tapes. AI is still in its infancy stage, but you can see it growing very fast in terms of where the utilization is and how we can utilize it to make our lives quicker, easier, and better. A great example is safety and making sure you can use it from a safety standpoint to do predictability around potential issues and making sure that we're continuing to be more proactive in preventing safety risks within our business.

ASI: What are the top three trends you believe will shape the future of adhesives technologies over the next five years?

Collins: I think a large portion will have some sustainability impact. The tapes industry historically has been heavy in solvent solutions. And I think if you were at the latest PSTC event, from an adhesive standpoint, a lot of the discussion, the primary part of the discussion, was on solvent-free type solutions. I think that's one trend that continues to gain legs and move forward. Solvent offers many specific capabilities that I think will be tough for those other technologies to replicate, but there continues to be significant advances in the other technologies. The other piece that is very interesting is, I guess, two different areas. One is labor reduction, and what I mean by that is available labor. Building and construction is a primary space where there is less labor than there are job openings. You get numbers anywhere from 400,000 to a million, and that trend continues, in particular with the baby boomers leaving the workforce. And tape is an interesting solution compared to other technologies for fastening things. It is a quicker, easier, and simpler way. I think it could be very interesting for the tape industry as things go forward: it could replace current methods, not because it's cheaper or necessarily better, as much as it is more effective and foolproof to install when you have less labor, you need to do it quicker, or you lack skilled labor.

ASI: What recent innovations or breakthroughs has your company introduced in adhesive technology?

Collins: I would say we consider ourselves a company that is built on providing solutions to our customers. We have some very exciting new materials that we have launched into the energy storage and the building and construction spaces that we think have some differentiation associated with them. We have some new adhesives that we're putting into our toolbox as we speak. But really where we tend to live is by problem solving. And our innovations typically are in concert with a third party or a collaborator of ours within the industry that is looking to utilize tape as part of a solution that they're introducing. We have the ability to rinse and repeat those things across the industries. And we tend to innovate off of that and drive system-type solutions — products that we can take and leverage across the business. We look at our innovation in terms of problem solving for our customers and what type of solutions to develop for them. And we can create a brand-new adhesive that might solve problem A. The question is, then, can we replicate that across the board? But that's an ongoing exercise that we conduct on a routine basis.

ASI: It sounds like there is a lot of collaboration and working with customers to provide the solution they need for a problem that they are working on, would that be accurate?

Collins: That's exactly right. I think that's sort of where it comes down to, in many instances, people aren't tape experts. They just know that they have a product that they want to sell, and tape is an important part of delivering upon the final value proposition of that product. And how can we help them solve that with what's available, or maybe even solutions that aren't available to us, and therefore we rely heavily upon our supply base to collaborate, whether it's adhesive, film, paper, or foam suppliers, you can go through the list of all the different people that we work with to create those solutions. And those solutions we're finding are true new-to-the-world solutions that then you can leverage in other platforms. But to say there's one massive new adhesive technology, I would say that that's more of an evolution than it is a true step-change innovation.