Plastic Pledge

PlasticPLEDGE

REAL OR A WASTE OF TIME?

Plastic waste is engulfing our planet and corporate giant Unilever has made bold promises to stem the tide, but how will this affect the company’s local suppliers? Laura du Toit and Fred Kockott tried to find out

The multinational corporation, Unilever, now sees business through greentinted glasses, having unveiled a commitment to halve its use of virgin plastic. There was a global chorus toasting the pledge. Switching to reusable packs, concentrated refills and using alternative materials, the consumer goods giant declared that by 2025 all of its packaging would be recyclable or compostable.

But how does it intend to make this a reality locally? KZN INVEST tried to find out, without much success.

Consumers anticipating shampoo refill stations, cardboard deodorant sticks and toothpaste tablets might be applauding a little too soon. Sustainability is a buzz word, along with the climate crisis and veganism. Some households – probably an enlightened few – have recycling bins which rescue milk bottles and egg cartons from the dump. Some stores offer paper bags rather than plastic, and it is now fashionable to own reusable metal straws.

Everyone is jumping on the “green” bandwagon and Unilever has acknowledged that plastic pollution is a huge, worldwide problem.

Chief executive of the South African arm of Unilever, Luc-Olivier Marquet, knows better than most how useful plastic can be – for packaging the millions of bottles of lotion, cleaning products and other consumer goods his multinational produces annually.

But Marquet is also acutely aware of its downside.

The father of two likes to spend family time at the beach but he finds this isn’t always pretty. He once went for a swim in Ghana, for example, and was shocked when he kept on touching plastics in the water, he said in an earlier interview.

“If things continue as they are, statistics suggest that by 2050 we are going to have more plastic than fish in the ocean. That is scary.”

Unilever is a founding signatory to the South African Plastics Pact, an initiative supported by the World Wild Fund (WWF) for Nature and the South African Plastics Recycling Organisation to tackle waste pollution at source and create a world where plastic has value.

At a Unilver leadership event in October last year entitled The Role of Industry in Driving an Inclusive Circular Economy, Unilever said it would help collect and process more plastic packaging than it sold. A circular economy is one in which products and materials are recycled, repaired and reused rather than thrown away, and in which waste from one industrial process becomes a valued input into another.

Unilever’s Pledge, as it is now dubbed, was welcomed by Tatjana von Bormann, policy head at WWF. “It is an exciting day because Unilever not only pledged to ambitious global commitments, but they have also scaled them down to signing something locally innovative.”

She said plastic recycling ought to be seen as an opportunity for economic growth and a way of doing business in South Africa.

According to the South African Plastics Pact, the first plastic bag was manufactured in 1950, just a few years after the first plastic bottles became commercially available. Since then around 8 300-million tons have been manufactured, half of which was produced since 2005. Of this almost billion tons, only a quarter has been recycled, incinerated or turned into energy.

Unilever reportedly uses about 700 000 tons of plastic each year. To halve that figure in five years shall be no small feat, said Andrew Venter, newly appointed director of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership South Africa.

“Currently, roughly 35% of the material Unilever puts out is unrecyclable. To switch that off at the scale Unilever operates requires massive change.”

Marquet reckons “the cost of doing nothing is much higher than the cost of taking action and there is no time to waste.”

Venter agreed. “We need to address the failure of our waste management systems and the concurrent failure of our recycling market systems. Until we do so, we’ll continue to accrue waste in our rivers, on our beaches and in the ocean.”

Venter said it was premature to comment on the progress Unilever had made towards its target, but said in terms of local enterprise, it had made strides to employ “waste-pickers”.

While the model is now tried and tested, Venter said the market value of recyclable waste was so low, waste-pickers were unable to forge viable businesses, remaining “trapped in a waste-poverty cycle”.

Venter said South Africa needed to prioritise the introduction of an Extended Producer Responsibility levy model, to help wastepickers develop viable and ethical micro-enterprises. The model should price the cost of cleaning our environment and recycling our packaging, into the products we buy.

Unilever was approached for input on this story and KZN INVEST asked what impact its pledge would have on the company’s local suppliers. At the time of going to press, the company had not responded.

KZN environmental consultant, Judy Bell, said it was one thing to make headline hogging pledges, but another to achieve the promised results.

“Yes, it would be good to find out how Unilever intends to make good on the pledge,” added Dave Still, chairman of the Duzi Umngeni Conservation Trust. “Quite possibly they have not worked that out.”

However, he said Unilever should be given credit for setting itself an ambitious goal and for making the goal public. “This is a great example for other industries in South Africa that are packaging intensive,” said Still.

“Waste management, particularly in KZN, is in a desperate state. Quite apart from the effect that poorly managed waste has on our morale as citizens, we have huge untapped tourism potential which we won’t ever realise if we don’t keep our towns and roads clean.”

Janet Simpkins, cofounder of Save Our Rivers ZA, said, “Until such time as packaging has a direct value to the consumer – that it’s worth more than simply discarding – the impact on the environment will be seen.”

Simpkins put out a direct challenge to Unilever: “You produce it! You directly incentivise its return for reuse or recycling.”