Mara Hancker becomes IK Managing Director
Mara Hancker (41) has been appointed Managing Director of IK Industrievereinigung Kunststoffverpackungen e.V. (the German Association for Plastics Packaging and Films) with effect as of 1 October 2019.
Holder of a degree in German language and literature, she has been with IK since 2015 and was previously Head of Public Relations at the Association. In her new function, she will continue to be responsible for IK’s communication work, develop it further strategically, thus strengthening the management of the Association under the leadership of General Manager Dr. Jürgen Bruder. Before joining IK, Mara Hancker worked as Director of Corporate Communications for Logwin AG and for Altana AG and Basler Securitas Versicherungs AG – in each case in the area of communications.
In the PackBox Forum at the FachPack trade fair, Mara Hancker, still in her role as Head of Public Relations, gave a lecture on „Plastic packaging – better than its reputation! „Particularly in the social media, many people have something to say about plastic packaging,“ said Hancker, adding that the criticism is usually harsh, but by no means always fact-based. „If we ask ourselves why there are so many plastic packagings, the answer lies in their functionality, their good cost-benefit ratio and the possibility of substituting materials such as glass and metal,“ she explained to the audience. „The growing number of single households coupled with increasing prosperity and consumption are other factors.
As representative of an industry with an annual turnover of EUR 15 billion, a workforce of 90,000, and over 300 member companies, the German Association for Plastics Packaging and Films is an important mouthpiece for this industrial sector, which accounts for a share of 44.7 percent of the total German packaging market. Despite all the „plastic bashing“, the sector is actually booming. In 2018, the volume of plastic packaging grew by 2.7 percent to 4.5 million tonnes and turnover increased by 3.2 percent to EUR 15.2 billion.
