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The green packaging war PDF Print E-mail
Written by Jesper Goul-Jensen. R Faerch Plast A/S, 2007   

The environmental debate is becoming increasingly heated, and not just in the political arena. Environmentally-aware businesses now have specific targets and strategies to reduce their impact to a minimum. Jesper Goul-Jensen of R Faerch Plast A/S presents the challenges. 

2006 was the year in which businesses realised the importance of giving the environment a helping hand. Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern report, and Bush's State of the Union Address 7 all contained an appeal to the world to wake up before the environment becomes incalculably damaged.

Scientists agree that manmade CO2 emissions have reached a level where they are having an effect on the climate. The big question now is how big will this effect be? The doomsday scenario is that the greenhouse effect will force global temperatures to increase, the polar ice caps melt and large areas of low-lying land will be flooded; in addition, the salt balance in the Atlantic Ocean will be upset, affecting the Gulf Stream and causing a new ice age. Whether it will be this bad is far from certain. On the other hand, one thing is sure - the effect of man's activities to date on earth will have a measurable effect.

Almost all national governments in the EU are giving the environment and energy conservation extra priority. Energy and environmental policy is quickly moving up the political agenda globally.

It is not only in the political arena that the environmental debate is becoming ever more heated. Environmental policy is a red-hot issue for private companies too. In fact, major changes have already been implemented at most enterprises, both horizontally across the various sectors and vertically through the value chain. Environmentally-aware businesses now have specific targets and strategies to reduce their impact to a minimum.

Retailers - the driving force

A lot has happened in the UK, especially in the past year. Retailers have had huge focus and influence on the environmental debate as they have each set goals for how they can reduce their environmental impact - goals that are impacting on the entire value chain.

Initially, it is a priority for retailers to reduce the weight of household waste that is sent for landfill. To date landfill has been the disposal method for the largest volume of waste generated in the UK. Subsequently, the priority may shift to reducing CO2 emissions, or the carbon footprint.

There is no doubt that the process the retailers have started is very healthy for the entire value chain. It forces all suppliers to study their own processes and procedures to see what can be done to improve - or minimise - any negative environmental impact.

It is not just in the UK that a green war is being waged between the retailers. They are taking a particularly active role throughout Europe when it comes to setting goals. In the US, large retailers have introduced a 'sustainable scorecard': suppliers have to answer a range of questions that are then given a value to produce an overall score. This score then serves as a key parameter in subsequent transactions.

The consumer

Several consumer associations have become involved and have actively participated in the environmental debate. One of the more vociferous of these is the Women's Institute (WI) in the UK. They have organised a day-of-action, when groups of WI members travelled to various stores and shopped as normal shoppers. The difference that day was that the women removed all the packaging that they believed was superfluous in relation to the product's needs and left it at the checkout (something that has subsequently prompted one retailer to test waste bins for excess packaging).

This stunt resulted in extensive media coverage and in one day the WI had successfully demonstrated a highly effective way of making retailers more aware of the waste issue. However, more thought-provoking was the packaging that the WI women removed. Almost without exception it was the secondary and tertiary packaging - the paper and cardboard sleeves as well as the display packaging that sat outside the primary packaging of tray and lid. In the main, the WI identified fruit and vegetable as over-packaged.

The hierarchy - what's most important?

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle is the hierarchy of environmental action as it is typically defined today. There is widespread agreement about this approach both among private companies and national authorities within the EU.

Reduce the amount of packaging, and by doing so reduce waste and CO2 emissions. For the remaining part, it is a question of reusing and recycling as much as possible. Landfill is the last resort.

This is a discussion that remains open. It is linked to technologies being developed and the huge differences in how individual countries handle waste in general. There are even marked differences in how packaging waste is handled within the various EU member states.

There are countries where almost all waste is incinerated, and where the energy generated is used for heat and power, the waste thereby serving as a replacement for fossil fuels. In some European countries, up to 10 per cent of power is generated by waste-incineration plants. In others, household waste is still dumped in landfill sites where it slowly decomposes, losing the energy locked it.

The point is that it can be very hard to reach agreement on a hierarchy for the entire EU, both politically and for businesses, due to the very disparate conditions in each country. It is very easy to end up having a discussion about how to define the various steps in the hierarchy - with the countries that use waste-incineration plants arguing that incineration is a way of recovering the energy in the packaging. Other countries don't have an incineration infrastructure so find it hard to include incineration within this definition. This, in reality, is what lays at the heart of the problems that politicians and businesses regularly discuss under the auspices of the EU.

What can businesses do?

First and foremost, it is crucial that all businesses take environmental issues seriously. We must not end up with a situation where a business's policies are more about winning market share via idle claims and misleading PR announcements than about real projects that genuinely benefit the environment. Of course, the 'green war' is also a way to win market share, but it must be won through real improvements - anything else is likely to result in shooting oneself in the foot.

We need to acknowledge that there are no easy solutions, the environment demands are serious and committed efforts are required from the business community, and that a general agreement is needed on goals and targets throughout the value chain. Otherwise, we risk ending up in a situation where certain environmental initiatives in the value chain simply negate one another. It is vitally important that everyone works to reach agreement on the goal for the environmental initiatives.

Challenges

Surveys of lifecycle studies have demonstrated that there are good environmental benefits in recycling packaging - in other words in making a closed loop. As in the case of PET plastic, we can collect the trays and bottles after they have served their purpose as packaging and the consumer has discarded them. After collection, the packaging can be cleaned washed and ground into flakes of a size and quality that enables them to be mixed and reintroduced into the raw materials stream. The original PET can be reused to make new packaging. PET material that contains recycled plastic is referred to as RPET, 'R' for 'Recycled'.

At the present time there are several plants capable of making RPET of a food contact grade and the number is growing. However, there are problems associated with RPET that must be addressed before it can be implemented in the market on a sufficiently large scale for it to have tangible environmental benefits.

To start with, no infrastructure has been developed for the collection of all plastic packaging, the one exception being the returns system for bottles, the majority of which are made of PET. It will be necessary for authorities to find a way of encouraging or supporting a collection infrastructure that ensures that the degree of recycling within the plastics industry is increased.

In addition, there are also legal barriers to reusing PET for food packaging in certain EU countries such as Spain and Italy. It is permissible to use RPET as food packaging in the rest of the EU, although in the majority RPET use is still subject to certain bureaucratic procedures. This is one of the cases that should be taken up centrally within the EU so that the rules for using recycled materials for food packaging can be harmonised.
 
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