It was fitting that Britain’s sea change in attitudes towards plastic packaging came from the sea. When Sir David Attenborough’s camera crew for the Blue Planet II documentary filmed a whale grieving over her dead calf, poisoned by plastic pollution, it’s unlikely they foresaw it would eventually lead to Asda removing the plastic from its swedes. But 2018 will arguably go down as ground zero for packaging, as public furore over excessive plastic use and packaging waste reached fever pitch across the country.
Such was the impact of the documentary that it coined its own phrase “the Blue Planet effect”, referring to the subsequent wave of anti-plastic sentiment from the public. With the world churning out around eight million tonnes of plastic into the oceans a year, the mood for change was rife. For packaging companies, the shift was immediate. “It was almost as if Sir David Attenborough made the series and our phones started ringing off the hook,” says Paul McReynolds, sales manager at Evesham Specialist Packaging.
His company has been offering pulp packaging options for ten years, which McReynolds says was previously a niche product for a few producers looking for an alternative. “Now probably out of 30 calls we get, 26 to 27 are enquiries about pulp. It’s gone absolutely crazy,” McReynolds adds.
Across the industry plastic alternatives and recyclable packaging have become hot property. David Newman, managing director of the Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries Association (BBIA), says the shift in mindset has been instant. “There’s been a huge surge in the industry in demand for bioplastics, an overwhelming amount of enquiries, an overwhelming number of people have asked for trials.”
Sensing the paradigm shift, the food industry has been quick to ensure it is ahead of the moral curve. One by one retailers have pledged to scrap all single-use plastic bags, and ditch black plastic containers, among other efforts to eliminate plastic waste. This fragmented approach was eventually harmonised and given targets by action group Wrap’s UK Plastics Pact, targeting full elimination of unnecessary plastic use by 2025 with 100 per cent to be reusable by then.
Yet with such a boom in anti-plastic sentiment, the movement has shifted from being a technical industrial problem to a popular trend, with marketing opportunities for companies to win goodwill. The rise in anti-plastic feeling has arguably been mirrored by a rise in anti-plastic lip service. Distinctions between recyclable, biodegradable, compostable and home-compostable packaging have not been well demarcated for customers, and even businesses and retailers.
“It’s okay making a product biodegradable or compostable but if the household can’t do it, then it doesn’t mean anything,” says Neil Hansford, industrial cryogenic and food expert at Air Products. He says the rise in recyclables is ultimately dependent on availability of infrastructure as much as the right materials. “You could be a street apart from someone and in a different council jurisdiction and have completely different recycling options,” he explains. “There’s a massive disjoint”.
Likewise, McReynolds says he has experienced muddy thinking when it comes to developing recyclable packaging products for customers. “Education starts further back than the consumer. I’ve had awkward meetings with retailers where they want compostable packaging for their products, but only one person in the room actually composts.”
Robyn Copley-Wilkins, packaging technologist at Riverford, says companies that know their customer base can better choose the right solution. “It’s about what’s right for your customer: 40 per cent of our customers have home composters, so sustainability for my customer is home-compostable. For other products such as food on-the-go, home compostable is no use; they are not going to keep it in their handbag until they get home. Sustainability doesn’t mean getting rid of plastics, it’s about taking a thoughtful and considered approach to packaging.”
Riverford has also started its own scheme for packaging that their customers cannot recycle, as well as switching plastics for a cellulose-based material. Copley-Wilkins says she is most concerned by the term “single-use plastic” which has been interpreted in different ways. “I saw one definition that single-use plastic was plastic used for one time only but not recyclable, while others say it has to be recyclable.”
If there is dispute over how best to deploy and define different types of recyclable packaging, there is unity however from the industry that there needs to be much greater government input in galvanising a national recycling infrastructure, citing other countries as examples to follow.
Hansford says: “If you go to Germany the difference is unbelievable. Education is the key in this. Starting from a young age, we need to educate people on the reasons why we do this. Teaching people about the small things we can do makes a massive difference to the wider picture.”
Copley-Wilkins says it would also help businesses to know what the UK government is planning for recycling. “It’s easy to spend money to make changes now, but if in five years’ time it’s a bottle deposit scheme or closed-loop scheme we don’t know, we don’t know what we are working towards.”
Newman believes that we still need to walk before we can run however, by having a greater debate on necessary and unnecessary plastics, which is the first clause in the UK plastics pact. “Lets look at what we don’t need to package with plastic in the first place and what the costs are of removing them. If we take off cucumber wraps we may waste a few cucumbers more, but that might be a price worth paying. I think we need to have a conversation about reusing plastic before how we recycle it.”
