Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy has hit back at the barrage of criticism aimed at supermarket packaging in recent weeks.
In a column for the Independent, which is running a national campaign against waste, Leahy insisted that packaging serves to protect the product, display a wide range of essential information, including ingredients and nutritional information, and meet food quality and safety standards.
He wrote: “Not all packaging is ‘excess’ or optional, and the truth is that the benefits of smart, efficient packaging in reducing waste have been finding their way back to customers for years.”
He added that high packaging standards mean that only two per cent of the food moving through the UK supply chain goes to waste.
But Leahy also acknowledged that too much packaging is going to landfill. “And if the environmental reasons to cut back on this weren’t compelling enough, there are very sound commercial reasons too - we spend something like £600 million each year on packaging,” he added.
Leahy accepted that supermarkets have an important role to play in cutting out the waste they generate. “But if we are to make real progress in shrinking the waste mountain, we must also help shift consumer attitudes towards packaging itself. We need to ask, what is it for? And what are the consequences of taking it away?” he wrote.
“But you can’t force the pace of change, even if it is for sound environmental reasons,” Leahy added. “Customers have to want to change, and that can take time.”
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