PACKAGING RECYCLING
The environmental challenge of packaging In a recent webinar for BSA members, Trewin Restorick (CEO of Hubbub), outlined some of the current challenges being faced in relation to packaging waste and the successful approaches that had been deployed to help counteract them, with Gareth Morton (discovery manager at Ecosurety) giving further insight on specific initiatives taking place. DRIVING ENGAGEMENT Hubbub, Trewin Restorick explained, is an environmental charity set up eight years ago with an aim to take environmental messages to a mainstream audience in a way that is fun, and it does this by talking about the things people are passionate about – the food they eat, clothes they wear, their homes and neighbourhoods They partner with big businesses (Starbucks, Ikea, Virgin Media O2, for example) to deliver behavioural change campaigns based around good academic thinking and good design, and then they measure what they do and share results so that others can learn from mistakes and successes made. MOST LITTERED To illustrate what Hubbub do and using cigarette butts (one of the most littered items, mainly by drunk young men) as an example, Trewin Restorick outlined how they had asked themselves “how could we stop this?” “We didn’t think a sticker would work, so came up with a ‘voting bin’, posing the question ‘who’s the best footballer in the world – Ronaldo or Messi?’, and whereby people could vote by which part of the bin people placed their cigarette butts in,” said Trewin Restorick. “At the time, Messi was ahead in the voting, so we weighted it in favour of Ronaldo, creating interest on social media, and then requests for bins, leading to the creation of a social enterprise selling around £20,000 worth of bins a month that now go all over the world, and helping to cut cigarette littering by 30-40%.” 30 I www.sandwichandfoodtogonews.co.uk
ON THE GO PACKAGING CHALLENGE Packaging on the go is a real issue, Trewin Restorick acknowledged. Prior to Covid, they had done some research and found that the UK generates 10.7 billion items of packaging from lunch on the go annually; the average person having four pieces of packaging from their lunch, making it very significant in terms of volume and its levels, and what people see and think about it, and thus at the forefront of people’s concern. Functionally it is good, but environmentally it’s a problematic thing to deal with for the following reasons. 1. Where does it end up? (a variety of locations – office, park, home etc.) 2. Having a closed loop system for it is difficult. 3. Small, lightweight, low value with a multitude of materials, making it hard to deal with. 4. Contaminated with food – a real issue at the recycling plant. 5. Currently, the UK has a poor closed loop recycling infrastructure for on the go packaging so local authorities do not invest in it, or not very well. In summary, it’s high on public perception but hard to deal with in terms of a closed loop recycling solution, Trewin Restorick felt.
As a result, government is slowly moving on Extended Producer Responsibility, observe Hubbub, and looking at moving the costs of littering and recycling on to businesses, leading to a significant cost to them. Deposit return schemes, and shifting the cost away from the local authority sector to the private sector, are also being looked at and following much consultation, legislation will be coming in, Trewin Restorick confirmed. In the meantime, Europe has been looking more at a circular economy and how they can introduce policies which drive more circularity “Maximising the resources that we have got in the UK helps resilience and to keep down costs, but when Covid hit, interest in packaging and environmental concerns did dip; our polling has revealed that people are concerned about it, but it is not so much at the fore-front of people’s minds,” said Trewin Restorick. “Public pressure for companies to act has eased, but will it come back when things settle? Our feeling is, it will, but over time, although concern about littering has greatly increased we have found, particularly when lockdowns were lifted. So this could be a bigger driver for change.”
PRESSURE FOR CHANGE Public concern around pollution and littering is massive, especially the latter; people are always writing to their councils about it, and plastic awareness is high after David Attenborough’s Blue Planet.
SOLUTIONS “There is a need to go back to the ‘waste heirarchy’ which should be driving all things environmental within a company; namely reduce the amount of materials available on the market, explore and push re-use, then recycling,
