Life used to be simple. I was Head of Packaging Buying at Mars Confectionery back in the late 1980s and whilst I did have issues with continuity of supply, finding the best material for a combination of quality, price and customer attractiveness, I didn’t ever worry about the sustainability – or otherwise – of my packaging.
It is very different today of course. Packaging is rightly seen as one of the largest contributors to waste, leading to pollution of the oceans, more landfill and unattractive surroundings. Plastics are in the main oil-based, and micro-plastics are contamination the planet in ways we don’t yet understand.
But doing the right thing is so difficult and complicated, as a consumer or a business. That was highlighted when I read Cacao Insider, a newsletter from Hotel Chocolat, which I received with my last order from the excellent chocolate retailer and manufacturer. It features a conversation with Sarah Leveridge, Head of Packaging Innovation and sustainability for the firm, in which she talks about her fascination with the circular economy and the beauty of “infinitely recyclable” aluminium, for instance.
But then she gets on to some of the trickier areas. For instance, she has experimented with bio-plastic coffee pods, which the supplier claims will compost in six weeks in your home compost. Not so, she says; after 8 weeks, they still look like… coffee pods. Some “compostable” packaging only breaks down in industrial composters, not your garden compost heap or bin. It doesn’t break down in landfill either – “it has to be broken down at around 80C, in very specific conditions”.
So Hotel Chocolat had made “compostable” the first statement in their Planet Pledge but they have revised that now given those complexities. They have extended their commitment “to making 100% of our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2022”. The firm has also pledged “to work towards making our direct operations Net Zero Carbon by 2030”.
As Leveridge explains in the article, they have also has done a lot of work to come up with better ways of recycling their coffee pods. They’ve come up with a little gadget that removes used coffee grounds from the pods (as the grounds can mess up recycling), then the pods can be stacked together, gently crushed and can go through kerbside recycling system.
Hotel Chocolat is also the first luxury brand to join the On-Pack Recycling Labelling scheme. According to the website, the OPRL scheme “aims to deliver a simple, consistent and UK-wide recycling message on retailer and brand packaging - whatever your sector - to help consumers reuse and recycle more material correctly, more often. That simple consistent message is now recognised by more than 3 in 4 consumers, with over 650 members now using it”.
But it can be difficult as a consumer to play your part. I was eating some rice crackers this week and the plastic tray had the recycling triangular logo on it, but the outer wrapper had no indication at all as to whether it was recyclable, maybe even compostable (unlikely) or just something to go into the general waste. That happens so often and it is very frustrating. As well as wasting my time, more importantly it must cause problems in terms of non-recyclable waste going into a recycling system – and the vice versa situation is also far from ideal of course.
As consumers we should put more pressure on firms to look at using more genuinely compostable material or, at worst, recyclable packaging. The legislators, media, investors and other stakeholders can help with that too. But perhaps we should also insist that when packaging is not recyclable, it is at least labelled clearly in that way.