Cover story Packaging SPOTLIGHT: SAINSBURY’S
Milk is one of Sainsbury’s best-selling products, shifting more than 436M litres a year. According to the retailer, if all its customers switched from milk bottles to milk bags, it could save 1,400 tonnes of packaging every year. Since launching the milk-bags, sales have exceeded expectations and now account for over 10% of all milk sales. The company is also planning to use 10% recycled material in its plastic milk bot- tles, saving 900 tonnes of virgin packag- ing a year.
Elsewhere, there is a target to reduce all food packaging by a third by 2015 – the most stretching in the retail sector. It is now selling its ‘basics’ tinned chopped tomatoes in FSC tetrapak cartons rather than cans, reducing packaging by half a million kilos a year.
A re-design of its egg boxes has also cut packaging by 9.4%, saving nearly 19 tonnes of rubbish a year.
This year alone, the firm has made a
4.4% saving in packaging weight towards the target, which is the equivalent of an estimated 8,000 tonnes.
sainsburys.co.uk
Such initiatives are an example of respond-
ing to consumer demand, and then shaping it. They also help raise awareness of other issues. However, issues such as plastic bags have dis- tracted some businesses, offering quick wins and high praise. If businesses want to show their true colour is green, they have much fur- ther to go. Sainsbury’s chief Justin King has publicly stated that consumers should “judge us on other things [than plastic bags]”. There’s also good reason to judge them on more than packaging. Speak to the industry experts and there’s a frustration – a frustration at being labelled the scapegoat for the ills of all consumption; a scapegoat that on average accounts for just 10% of a product’s overall environmental footprint.
“It’s madness,” says Steve Kelsey, strategic innovations director at brand consultancy, Pi Global. Kelsey estimates that a “frankly outrageous” £1B has been “misapplied” to packaging waste advocacy in the past dec- ade, including “worthless communication and short term practices”.
Had that been spent on infrastructure, it wouldn’t have solved all the problems, but we’d certainly be further forward, he says. “The reality is that the UK system is in an embryonic state with many compromise solu-
24 | Sustainable Business | October 2010
tions in play,” he says. “We don’t have any- thing like the infrastructure we need to recycle materials effectively, and until we do, we have to make do and mend.” As a result, packaging companies have become very good at providing light weight- ed, or low-carbon solutions for companies, with the environmental benefit often a bonus of the economic: the Jugit uses 75% less pack- aging than bottles, and is sold at 6p less than the equivalent bottle in Sainsbury’s. For Waitrose customers the savings, finan- cial or economic, were irrelevant. For the supermarket, the fact people weren’t buying the bags wasn’t. The same thing happened to Migros in Switzerland. Even though the packaging was, on its own, ‘better’ environ- mentally, when the product and the consumer was added to the equation, the arguments began to unravel.
WRAP recently carried out an LCA of plastic pouches, finding that even if they were landfilled or burned, they still had a lower car- bon footprint than the standard HDPE bottle. However, there is a caveat: “We’ve done work on different types of milk packaging and there’s no one winner in terms of material, because it depends on how they are transport- ed, used, and how they are disposed of at the
end of their life,” said a WRAP spokesperson. This includes how much of the product is wasted. According to Incpen, it takes 38MJ of energy to supply one person’s milk for a week, of which 4.4MJ is the packaging. Spilling or wasting just 12% ‘costs’ 4.5MJ. To put this in context, WRAP has found that more milk than any other product is poured down the sink – 330,000 tonnes a year, equat- ing to £250M.
“All of this could have been avoided if it was better managed or stored in the home,” the report concluded.
Some of the Jugit’s detractors suggest it hasn’t worked for some consumers because it’s “tricky to use” with milk being spilt and wasted. The new design is certainly better, and the packaging is certainly lower impact. But its arrival spotlights how packaging should only ever be part of the story when it comes to environmental impact. There also needs to be context.
Packaging’s primary role is to protect the product inside and cut waste – whether that be longer shelf-life, ease of use or portion con- trol. Reducing packaging waste should never distract from this.
Contrary to the old adage, we should defi- nitely be crying over spilt milk.
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