GROWING FOR GOOD

SUNDAY BEVERAGE & FOOD GB&I IS COMMITTED TO DRIVING POSITIVE CHANGE FOR LOCAL RETAILERS IN SCOTLAND AND THEIR CUSTOMERS – AND SAYS HOW WE RECYCLE AND REMOVE PLASTIC IS KEY TO THAT AMBITION.

BY MATT GOULDSMITH, CHANNEL DIRECTOR, WHOLESALE, SUNTORY BEVERAGE & FOOD GB&I

Our team is passionate about our Growing for Good vision. How we recycle and remove plastic is a key part of this vision. We are designing our drinks packaging for circularity, as closing the loop on the recyclability of plastics is key to its sustainable use. To that end, we are making sure that all our packaging is recyclable by 2025 or sooner.

We’ve invested almost £8m in making our brands more sustainable. Lucozade Sport bottles made from 100% recycled plastic (rPET) feature a smaller label, to reduce the volume of virgin plastic in the marketplace. The 500ml Ribena bottle was similarly redesigned, an key step on our journey towards 100% recyclable packaging by 2025.

We are also reducing excessive and unrecyclable packaging across our brands. Ribena was the first major UK soft drinks brand to replace plastic straws with paper ones – preventing up to 16 tonnes1 of plastic being produced per year – and last year we made our Lucozade Energy bottle wrappers transparent so that they could be recycled.

Our Growing for Good vision is driving the work we do to minimise our environmental impact. Sustainability matters. 92%2 of consumers say sustainable businesses should be standard and one-third of shoppers (33%3) are now choosing to buy from brands that they believe are doing social or environmental good.

Deposit Return Schemes

We want as many of our bottles as possible to be recycled as possible and that is why we support the introduction of effective deposit return schemes and are a founding member of Circularity Scotland.

Last year, we commissioned a white paper study on deposit return schemes called Deposit Return Schemes: What’s in Store? Our research found it takes just seven weeks for most shoppers to rethink their relationship with plastic bottles (88%) and to appreciate their value after living with the scheme.

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As part of this we ran four behavioural studies with almost 8,000 people. Research included placing over 5,500 people in a virtual reality shopping environment to see how they would react when a theoretical deposit return scheme was introduced. Further studies focused on understanding how consumers lived with deposit return schemes.

We discovered that shoppers experience a three-stage mental shift when required to pay a deposit, which the company has categorised as Surprise, Review and Reset.

Surprise: Shoppers experience surprise at being asked to pay more for soft drinks in a retail environment and return items for a fee, which is currently set at 20p per item in Scotland.

Review: In the second stage, consumers review their relationship with materials like plastic bottles and learn how to adjust to the new scheme rules after having to re-evaluate the value of their drinks packaging.

Reset: And in the final phase, shoppers reset and change their behaviour towards materials like plastic bottles resulting in new routines and different choices.

Q Deposit Return Schemes: What’s in Store? can be downloaded from bit.ly/3IqUMK6.

Deposit Return Schemes: What’s in Store? can be downloaded from bit.ly/3IqUMK6.