New schemes to reduce packaging and encourage reuse rely on ‘extended consumer responsibility’. But will they work? David Burrows reports.
WHAT’S HAPPENED? Morrisons has started selling milk in glass bottles again. “We want to help our customers live their lives with less plastic,” said the supermarket’s packaging manager Natasha Cook, and “reusing glass milk bottles is an easy leap for many people to make”.
THAT SOUNDS GREAT. Maybe. Let’s look at whether it’s ‘easy’ first. A recent study in the journal Sustainable Consumption and Production found that relative to other products milk in a glass bottle was something that people were happy to return for reuse. Almost one in three (32%) said they’d be happy to bring back a glass milk bottle. The next most popular was coke in a glass bottle (7%). “One interpretation is that consumers’ behaviour is relatively habitual, such that they are willing to engage in what they – or others like them – have done previously, but are less willing to do something new,” the researchers noted.
THAT SOUNDS PROMISING. Perhaps, however this is a far cry from a quick rinse and popping the bottle back on your doorstep. What’s more, at 90p a pint, the glass pints in Morrisons can be more expensive than doorstep delivery. Milk in a plastic bottle costs around 50p a pint.
AH, BUT IS THAT RECYCLABLE PLASTIC? Yes. In the UK, 90% of milk bottles are made from HDPE (high density polyethylene). The Dairy Roadmap update in 2018 suggested recycling of these bottles had hit 85%. Use of recycled content (rHDPE) had reached 31%, with a target of 50% by the end of 2020. Indeed, plastic milk bottles are often trumpeted as a success story. All councils also collect them.
SO ARE YOU SAYING PLASTIC IS BETTER? Whether this is the right decision from a carbon perspective is debatable. Morrisons says the move will “reduce CO2” but hasn’t published details of any supporting life cycle assessments (LCAs) to prove it. LCA experts suggest glass can beat plastic if the logistics (ideally local supply and distribution) and washing process are optimised. But you also need people to bring the bottle back – and probably quite a few times.
YOU DON’T SOUND CONVINCED. Not totally. Should Morrisons be focusing its efforts elsewhere – not least given its position of second bottom in Greenpeace UK’s analysis of the top 10 supermarkets’ efforts in plastic, published earlier this year? Or will the glass bottle trial produce valuable data to help shift behaviour towards this kind of in-store reuse and refill scheme? Time will tell, but the concluding line in a recent podcast by consumer group Which? – Is plastic packaging really that bad? – sticks in my mind: “We need to show the supermarkets and the manufacturers that we want to do our bit and it’s on them to make sure we can.”
SO WHERE’S THE BALANCE THEN? Exactly. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) should ensure producers of packaging pay the full costs of managing it once it becomes waste. This will drive them, in theory, to produce less packaging and much less of the hard-to-recycle stuff. But already the goalposts are shifting. In recent months there have been a number of schemes launched that rely on what you could call ‘extended consumer responsibility’. Supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury’s have launched plastic film collection schemes at some stores (though there are now doubts whether this material is actually being recycled). In April, Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts announced a ‘Podback’ project, which means those with used coffee capsules can bag them up and take them to one of 6,500 drop-off points. “We are […] providing simple and convenient routes for people to recycle their pods,” said JDE UK&I marketing director Toby Bevans.
WILL ANYONE DO THAT? If you’re the kind of person that craves the convenience of a pod machine for your morning coffee, are you likely to be willing to traipse across town with the waste? Podback also includes a trial in two English councils that will see the pods collected from the kerbside along with other waste (they will be in separate bags). This is what 90% of users want, apparently. Convenience, as always, is key. JDE and Nestlé are even trying to convince supermarkets to collect the pods when they drop off shopping.
THAT SOUNDS BETTER. Close collaboration between brands like this, especially given their market share, is no bad thing. As a sustainability lead at one of the companies told me recently: “We wouldn’t have normally been seen in a room with a competitor like that and now we’re working together on a shared infrastructure, a shared proposition, with shared funding to really make a difference.” But the share of responsibility between producer and consumer is going to be an area of growing tension (and let’s not forget that if these companies can turn the packaging we bring back into new packaging they not only save resources but an awful lot of money too).
SO, YOUR GLASS IS HALF FULL? Morrisons might get lucky with its milk. Indeed, look at the other 70 or so products and packaging formats the experts looked at in the study above and there was very little willingness to return anything else. And yet consumers are being asked to bring back more and more of their packaging, either to be reused or recycled. Does this mean it’s no longer ‘hard-to-recycle’? And naturally some will begin to ask: why are we being asked to do these companies’ dirty work?
