THE BRAND OWNER’S PERSPECTIVE: PEPSICO
Elisabeth Skoda catches up with Archana Jagannathan, senior director for sustainable packaging at PepsiCo, and explores how a collaborative approach helps the company to develop sustainable packaging solutions. ES: Could you tell us a bit more about your role at PepsiCo, and what responsibilities it entails?
AJ: My role at PepsiCo focuses on driving a much more sustainable future for packaging, focusing on Europe. I see this as an opportunity to make a difference to PepsiCo and what PepsiCo does, but also use the reach and scale that we have to influence and drive change in the industry more broadly, so I’m hoping we can make a small difference to the health of our planet for the future generations.
ES: Earlier this year, PepsiCo published its 2019 Sustainability Report. Could you give our readers a quick overview on the report highlights in the area of packaging? AJ: PepsiCo’s sustainability strategy overall, and what we have laid out in the report, focuses on three key things. First of all is Reduce. We think it’s really important to genuinely reduce the amount of packaging and plastics that we use overall, and a great example that we’ve highlighted in our Sustainability Report is the use of technology, the use of charged compaction technology for our snack films, which we’ve used to successfully reduce their size. It means that we use technology to make sure that the chips settle down in the bag a bit better, and therefore you can have a smaller size bag. But equally, we have used technology in Europe to reduce the size of our outer bags for our snack multipacks by 30%. That might seem small, but given the amount of snacks that PepsiCo produces, that is a huge amount of virgin plastics savings. We are continuing to lightweight our bottles, reduce our films, and there are some great examples that we have laid out in the Sustainability Report.
The second key area is Recycling, firstly making sure that all our packaging is recyclable, compostable and biodegradable, and we’ve committed to 100% by 2025. We are at 88% now. But equally important is making sure that we close the loop, making sure that we support systems that collect, sort and recycle materials. After the report was published, we announced that we joined the leadership team of Holy Grail, which is a really innovative digital watermarking technology that will hopefully help to sort waste much more efficiently and give waste a better second life. We have included 100% recycled PET in Tropicana, Naked and Lipton, and we are looking to go much further in the coming years as well. The third line of what we talk about in the report is Reinvent, i.e. radically rethinking materials and business models. SodaStream is a great example of that. We acquired the business in 2018 and are expanding it in Europe as we speak. We estimate that we will probably save about 67 billion bottles from the expansion of SodaStream. But equally, use of alternate materials is a really important part of our Reinvent strategy. We have recently announced a consortium with Diageo and Unilever on a project called Pulpex, which will be a first of its kind paper bottle, and we are really looking forward to bringing it to market and testing it on one of our brands in 2021. On the snacks side, we are working with Danimer Scientific on compostable materials. I think technology is evolving so fast in this space, so making sure that we are continuing to explore alternative materials is a key part of our strategy.
ES: You mentioned that PepsiCo is 88% on the way towards its goal of using 100% recyclable, compostable or biodegradable by 2025. What would you say are the biggest challenges of the remaining 12%, and how is the company planning on getting there?
Archana Jagannathan
Packaging Europe | 29 |
