Suvi worked as an R&D Engineer at Amerplast. Her work included product development, customer support and finding answers to different product and production related challenges, for example. Before starting in the position, she worked at Amerplast’s carrier bag converting department for a couple of summers while studying Materials Science at the Tampere University of Technology. She also worked part time in the Amerplast Quality laboratory during her studies.
She liked the variability of the work. Suvi described being an engineer as being like a detective. Every day includes solving different challenges and there are no ready solutions or easy answers to all of the questions. At school you learn mostly theory, while at work you learn how to apply it all in practice. In addition, the industrial scale is very different from a school environment.
As part of her work, Suvi organised, for example, test runs in the production with the production teams and she enjoyed working with highly skilled colleagues. “Working with professionals from different fields at Amerplast and with the customers develops your own expertise and know-how. Flexible packaging industry is a very versatile and interesting field and there are things coming across sometimes to which nobody yet has the answers”, Suvi explained.
When she was asked about advice for environmentally aware consumers, who are thinking about plastics and packaging related issues she said: “The public discussions are focused mainly on the marine litter and the replacement of plastics. We should be focusing increasingly on recycling of all the materials. Moving away from plastics is not automatically an environmentally sound decision. There are many new innovative and more environmentally friendly solutions being developed and Amerplast customers are asking for new ecological solutions”, Suvi said. “What all of us can do at home is to sort and recycle all of our household waste. When I separately sort and recycle my own plastic packaging waste at home, I can see it again in my workplace as new recycled raw material. The more we recycle, the more we have of material for new recycled product applications”, she concluded.