NEWS that the amount of plastic packaging produced for Britain’s supermarkets increased last year appears to be completely at odds with claims by the nation’s major food retailers to be successfully waging war on the frowned-upon material. But plastic packaging use and recycling is a topsy-
turvy world, where the blame game favoured by woke members of the millennial generation may need to change its sights. Take single-use plastic bags. Characterised as a major pollutant and climate change contributor, they actually possess one-tenth of the carbon footprint of ‘bags for life,’ which are typically used about ten times but need at least 250 outings just to mitigate the carbon emitted in their creation. Removing packaging from fresh fruit and vegetables meanwhile results in exchanging plastic waste for food waste, with some stores seeing a doubling of bruised or damaged foodstuffs shorn of plastic protection. ‘Like plastic straws, plastic bags are a tiny, tiny
percentage of the overall problem,’ says Kevin Vyse, head of technical at sustainable packaging firm Rapid Action Packaging and a motivational speaker on the circular economy. ‘The biggest single plastic pollution problem in the world’s oceans is not to do with plastic bags and only a very tiny part of it comes from European coastlines. Movements need poster children and plastic bags very quickly became one, as did plastic straws, but the irony is that this has exacerbated the problem hugely.’ Supermarket plastic levels rose from 886,000 to
900,000 tonnes in 2018/19, with Britain’s major grocery groups ordering and producing 58 billion pieces of plastic, according to a report published by Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency. Seven out of the UK’s top ten supermarkets
increased their plastics use, with Asda and Aldi the worst offenders. Budget supermarket Iceland dropped to seventh
place in the report’s supermarket plastics league table from top position the previous year, despite its managing director Richard Walker stating that the only way of dealing with the plastic crisis is to ‘turn down the tap on production’. Only Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury’s achieved marginal reductions. The report’s findings chime with recent evidence
from Britain’s high streets. In December, Iceland abandoned a Liverpool trial to sell loose fruit and vegetables in supermarkets after experiencing a 30 per cent drop in sales of the produce. The retailer has pledged to become the first retailer in the world to remove all plastic packaging from its own-label ranges by 2023.
CorpComms | February/March 2020
However, while customers still want efficiency and practicality, Iceland found many were unwilling to foot the additional cost brought about by the move to sales of loose produce. German rival Lidl is also
Britain’s supermarkets don’t actually know how to reach their targets
considering a dramatic change to its plastic bag reduction strategy after admitting that many of its 9p ‘bags for life’ are being used only once and thrown away, with less than one per cent returned for replacement. If a trial of removing all bags for life from sale at
54 stores in Wales is successful, the company will withdraw them from all UK stores, saving 80 million bags and 2,500 tonnes of plastic a year. Tesco, which fared comparatively well in the report, has also had to delay some of its single-use plastic reduction actions. After initially pledging to stop using black plastic microwave meal trays by the end of 2019, the group has admitted that 13 per cent of packaging on its own-brand products is hard to recycle.
It now plans to ditch plastic ready-meal trays,
yoghurt pot lids, straws and loose fruit bags this year, removing one billion pieces of plastic from its own- label products and banning brands with too much non-recyclable packaging from its shelves. Asda, meanwhile, seems determined to remedy
last year’s performance, bringing forward its target to reach 30 per cent recycled content in its own-brand plastic packaging to the end of this year – five years
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