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Max Wolf, Alcon’s general manager of vision care and contact lenses, spoke with OT about the sustainability and long-term prospects of the touch lens industry.
This autumn, the touch lens company Alcon presented its new and expanded production facility in Grosswallstadt, near Frankfurt.
This facility is where it all happens for Alcon. That’s where concepts are born.
Max Wolf with OT Associate Editor Lucy Miller On a macro level, for the tactile lens industry, dropouts are a challenge. It takes effort to get a customer to buy touch lenses. As an industry, we have the opportunity to offer even better answers to reduce churn and grow the category as a whole. How to make the most of time, eye strain and dry eye sensations, and make it less difficult to put it on and take it off, are significant opportunities for the industry. These are the same demanding situations over the past decade, and we’ve made wonderful strides as an industry. But I would say that there are still a lot of opportunities for new products and better services.
All of our facilities have sustainability goals, but most importantly, as a company, we have sustainability goals. We have dozens of production sites. As a company, we are committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030. We also aim to ensure that no waste is sent to landfills for the production site. We’ve made smart progress, but the last single-digit percentage we want to get is the hardest. And we’re working on it.
There is certainly a lot of accountability on the manufacturing side to continue to look at sustainability opportunities, beyond the things that I mentioned – carbon neutrality and zero waste to landfill. We have numerous other initiatives that look at efficiency, whether that’s energy consumption; whether it’s water consumption. These things are less visible, but equally important to really drive impact. That’s a topic for all manufacturers.
Patients with astigmatism are sensitive to comfort and dry eyes, so they want even greater answers when it comes to comfort.
Patient care is at the centre of everything we do. We are here to help people see brilliantly, and that is patient care at its essence.
Customer service is imperative to our project because we can only serve patients if they have the most productive products and service.
Sustainability is very international in the manufacture of tactile lenses and for this we have very ambitious goals.
Vision is essential for life. As human beings, the sense of vision is imperative. We’re here to help others have better vision, see clearly, and improve their lives. This is a deeply emotional and very vital issue for Alcon.
The long run is brilliant. There’s a lot of room for innovation and a lot of wonderful concepts for the long-term of eye care, touch lenses, and optometry. We’re going to see a lot of innovation over the next decade.
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