Udo Schütz was awarded the Rudolf Diesel Medal at the MAN Museum in Augsburg on 4 July. The company founder and owner of Schütz GmbH & Co. KGaA received the prestigious award in the “Most Sustainable Innovation Achievement” category. This honours his work in the field of sustainable packaging solutions.


The Rudolf Diesel Medal, which has been awarded since 1953, is Europe’s oldest innovation prize and goes back to the inventive lifetime achievement of engineer Rudolf Diesel. With this award, the German Institute for Inventions honours personalities and companies that have made a significant contribution to increasing the quality of life, prosperity and maintaining the culture of innovation in Germany.


This includes Udo Schütz, who revolutionised the world of packaging with the group of companies he founded in 1958. With his innovations, he has made a significant contribution to making the global use of packaging more sustainable.


Udo Schütz’s key moment came in the mid-1970s with the development of a completely new product: the IBC. With this system, Schütz combined the highest quality, safety and sustainability, setting a new benchmark for industrial packaging.


As a company with a focus on sustainability, Schütz has always been concerned about what happens to IBCs after they have been emptied. For this reason, the internationally active company developed the global return and reconditioning programme Schütz Ticket Service. As part of this programme, emptied containers are collected from customers and the steel grid cages are reconditioned and reused. The plastic inner containers are replaced with brand new inner bottles for the new packaging application and are subjected to a comprehensive material recycling process.


In this way, the plastic material recovered from the collection process is channelled into new packaging solutions. For example, 30 % of the IBC inner containers produced as part of the Green Layer range are made from recycled material.

From left to right: Prof. Dr. Alexander J. Wurzer (moderator and spokesman for the Rudolf Diesel Board of Trustees), Udo Schütz and Prof. Kurt Mehnert (laudator and managing director of Mehnert Corporate Design GmbH & Co. KG).