The environmental challenge of packaging.

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%.”

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.

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.

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.”

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,

and then responsible disposal (ie. how do you stop all that packaging being littered?). This approach has been around for years, but focus always tends to have been on the ‘visible’ recycle aspect (reduce and re-use being harder to achieve and with less emphasis in businesses),” Trewin Restorick continued.

“In connection with reduction, the sandwich sector is doing a lot in terms of innovation and the complexity of packaging – can you produce packaging which keeps food safe and helps with longevity, and has less of a mix of materials, particularly plastics?

“At the same time, there needs to be consumer education (should the consumer no longer be able to see the sandwich due to no plastic wrap, for example, and will they actually recycle it?). Light-weighting can help, but it can make materials harder to recycle. There’s a need to think about can you change your retailer and customer behaviours? We did a trial with some simple messaging at a McDonalds around not taking so many napkins, using less stirrers etc., which had a big impact on the amount of materials used and the amount of littering in the store, indicating that having a good ‘reduce policy’ is a fundamental first step.”

RE-USE AND REFILL SCHEMES

These are growing, Trewin Restorick reported, and are likely to be further driven by legislation, although Covid has put a bit of a stop to progress, with quite a few concepts along these lines starting to suffer financially, but there are still things the industry can do.

Hubbub persuaded Starbucks to introduce a 5p charge on all their single-use disposable cups, whereas if you go in with a reusable cup, you can get a 25p discount. They trialled the 5p levy in 36 stores and sales did not diminish, whereas take-up of re-usable cups doubled, and public perception of Starbucks improved.

Based on this, Starbucks extended the scheme to all of their 900+ stored in the UK, and now to other countries, with eventual plans to do so to all their territories. All the 5p levies go back to Hubbub as a charity who use the money to invest in recycling and re-use campaigns (for example, they ran a big re-use campaign at Gatwick airport where they encouraged people to use re-usable cups).

They have also invested the money raised – around £100,000,000 – in coffee cup recycling facility infrastructure across the UK that can be found at train stations and shopping centres, for example, although the predominant aim was to boost re-use in the first instance and shift consumer behaviour.

RECYCLING

“In conjunction with Ecosurety in Leeds, we got 27 companies (Coca Cola, Pepsico, Costa, Starbucks and Marks and Spencer, for example) to each invest £10,000 and go to Leeds City Council to look at ways to boost recycling rates in the city,” Trewin Restorick explained.

“This was called the Leeds by example campaign in which various collection methodologies were tested, leading to an uptick in recycling rates there and a decrease in contamination at the recycling points. This successful campaign made a real difference and was extended to other cities - Swansea, Edinburgh and Dublin - and is to be extended to parts of London and the Midlands this year.”

They also looked at incentives, such as a machine where you can drop off your bottle or can and get money off, testing this in the form of a token which could be redeemed in the local area, but finding that people did not really redeem the token that much, instead liking using the machine. They changed the amount of money and also gave it to local charities, but apart from certain demographics like students who did use the incentives, found that redeeming of the tokens did not alter much whereas simply having the machine available instigated a lot of recycling with low levels of contamination – again suggesting that thinking about ways to incentivise, or nudge, your consumers could be part of recycling initiatives.

RESPONSIBLE DISPOSAL

“In Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, we flew drones over the entire area, mapping what litter was being dropped and where, and by who (the most littered item being cigarette butts, but also a lot of sandwich packaging, napkins and coffee cups),” said Trewin Restorick.

“We were then able to share this information with Bournemouth City Council, assisting them in when and where collections were made, where bins and any associated messaging were placed, as well as the nature of those bins (such as bins by the beach that played disco music when anything was put in – a ‘playful’ approach that disincentivised littering).

“In fact, use of this insight enabled littering to be cut by around 70%, we discovered, alongside some strong ‘don’t mess up the area’ messaging run by the council, although we found this increased littering (it’s best to stick to lighter, more playful language, I would advise).

“We also worked with businesses – such as with McDonalds - to let them know where most of their litter was being dropped, and where to send their collection teams to. This, and the data insight, in conjunction with accessible, easy to use bins, had a dramatic effect on littering. Indeed, there is a lot companies can do if they have access to good data, indicating that responsible disposal needs to be part of a corporate policy around environment and packaging, even though this aspect is not ‘top’ of the waste hierarchy.”

In conclusion, Trewin Restorick referenced the massive nature of this area, and it being a potentially complex one for the food to go sector. However, campaigns already initiated and data gathered provide good indicators of what can be done in the future to reduce the environmental impact of littering and waste packaging disposal.

Turn to page 42 for the second of these articles.