Austin Davey(Visy), Ron Fairchild, Anthony Pratt (Visy), Professor John Sheridan, Philip Irvine (Visy)

CEO of Visy, Anthony Pratt spoke to a group of aspiring engineers as part of a seminar series in semester 1, designed to promote leadership for Monash engineering students.

As a commitment to developing engineers of the future, Visy will support a number of Monash engineering initiatives in 2012, including the Engineering Leadership program, Summer Research projects and more student seminars.

Anthony Pratt is Global Chairman of Visy, the world’s largest privately-owned packaging, paper and recycling company. Visy employs more than 5500 people in Australasia and a further 3500 in the USA . Visy - known as Pratt Industries in the USA - has been named Australia’s leading company for environmental performance four times since 2000.

 Anthony graduated from Monash University, Melbourne, with a Bachelor of Economics (Hons) in 1982. After graduation he joined the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co, before joining Visy.

In 1991 he moved to the United States to spearhead the family’s business expansion into America, where he built Pratt Industries USA to a one billion dollar company and now employs more US citizens than any other Australian company.

In 2007 he made a commitment at President Clinton’s Global Initiative in New York City to invest $1 billion in clean energy and recycling infrastructure over the next 10 years.

Anthony, is firmly committed to environmental causes, and has been honored for his efforts by Mikhail Gorbachev’s Global Green USA and Ted Turner’s Captain Planet Foundation.

Visy’s clean energy plants use waste from pulp and paper mills with 70000 tonnes per year saving of CO₂

“In the future we may see landfills completely eliminated,” said Anthony. “Landfills create more CO₂ than the worldwide aviation industry.”

“The world needs a lot more engineers for these technologies to develop and meet these challenges. The Engineering Leadership program is an important part of the future.  Australia needs to encourage entrepreneurship here, with hands on graduates prepared to look at the practical and theoretical side to find creative answers and to see opportunities in everything.”