SUSTAINABILITY


ahead of its original deadline. It says this will avoid the annual use of 19,500 tonnes of ‘virgin’ plastic, while it will make all of its own-brand packaging 100 per cent recyclable by 2025, having removed more than 6,500 tonnes of plastic packaging from its own-brand range since February 2019. Such pledges are laudable. Yet


Some retailers are moving to


alternatives which have larger carbon footprints


the failure of so many of Britain’s supermarkets to reduce their plastics use last year suggests that there are multiple factors at work. ‘It reflects the fact that this is difficult,’ says


Mike Barry, the former director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer who is now an adviser at CoGo, a New Zealand purpose-driven organisation with a stated ambition to ‘change business to change the world’. He adds: ‘Supermarkets need to get all the moving parts aligned; from plastics, packaging and food manufacturing to retailing, customers’ homes, council collection, waste industry separation and plastic industry reuse. All that then needs to be wrapped up in a new emerging government policy and tax system and then you have to get traditionally-siloed competitors to work together. It’s not easy.’ Dan Dicker, managing director of waste consultancy


and eco-product development company Ashortwalk, is more hard-hitting in his diagnosis of the problem. ‘Britain’s supermarkets don’t actually know how


to reach their targets,’ he says. ‘It’s due to a lack of understanding and leadership, but mainly the lack of infrastructure and solutions being offered to them by the government, big industry and supply chain sectors. ‘The danger is they are reacting like rabbits in headlights with ill-thought solutions that actually cause more harm than good. They need to proactively seek guidance from academia, researchers, pioneers and coal-face industry rather than just lazily leveraging established supply chains.’ Liz Goodwin, senior fellow and director of food


loss and waste at sustainability research organisation The World Resources Institute, believes that ‘some retailers are clearly doing more than others’. She says: ‘All the major retailers are trying to reduce single-use plastics and make their packaging more recyclable, but it’s quite tricky given the existing supply chains and the need to find alternatives.


46 CorpComms | February/March 2020


‘The other point to note is that some


retailers are moving to alternatives which have larger carbon footprints – and so the balance of issues needs to be carefully thought-through. UK retailers are working on the issue. Not enough is being done but there is a lot of consumer pressure which is helping drive progress.’ Some concrete conclusions are


clear. One reason for last year’s plastic


production figures is that Britain continued to see growth in its groceries market, which increased food sales by two per cent, adding to packaging needs. There was also strong growth in demand for on-the-go food, which is almost exclusively sold in single-use packaging, while two hot summers led to an uptick in the figures for single-use plastic bottles. The report notes that there was also an increase in


sales of branded products, which account for between 40 and 60 per cent of an average supermarket’s sales. Shruti Choudhary, senior strategy consultant


at brand purpose agency Given London, says this suggests a need for much more robust and systematic engagement between retailers and fast-moving consumer goods suppliers. ‘Most retailers already have rigorous processes


in place to assess own-brand suppliers packaging footprint and this approach needs to be extended to all suppliers,’ she says. There are already signs, however, of resistance among some of the world’s biggest food and drink producers, with Coca-Cola’s head of sustainability Bea Perez telling the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, that the company will not ditch


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