Food waste is one of the big themes this week as the fallout from the UK government’s decision to drop plans to introduce mandatory reporting for it continues. WSH’s director of sustainable business Mike Hanson described the U-turn as “absolutely staggering and a scandalous dereliction of duty”.
It’s too expensive, ministers claim. Actually, food waste reporting could save businesses £703m a year, say campaigners. That figure, based on a 20% reduction of food waste – which given the target to hit 50% by 2030 under the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 should be well within reach – comes from a new analysis by Feedback.
Once upon a time the opgovernment performed U-turns on U-turns but on this it’s unlikely. A voluntary approach to food waste reporting will now remain in place until at least mid-2025 – at which point a review will be undertaken. That’s right, we are back to an era of industry-led initiatives that get us nowhere.
Even those who regularly sign up are fed up with the concept: because the laggards win. Whether it is packaging or product reformulation, commodity sourcing or net-zero reporting, the evidence that these approaches work is scant. And yet the government’s new waste prevention programme leans heavily on them. “We mean business when it comes to preventing waste,” said resources minister Rebecca Pow.
Pow of course wowed us with her knowledge of home and industrial compostable packaging during a BBC Radio 4 show last week. On Monday, they revisited the topic of packaging, replaying the minister’s ‘advice’ – that compostable packaging could be popped in the plastic recycling bin – before trying to put the record straight by interviewing Stuart Hayward-Higham, chief technical development and innovation officer at waste contractor Suez. You can listen in from 13 minutes here. Be warned: it’s (still) confusing but the dithering from Defra on a raft of packaging policies certainly isn’t helping matters.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging has of course been delayed. The data and reporting of it however has not. As The Grocer reports, Defra launched a new report packaging data (RPD) service this week, with large companies able to submit their data from Wednesday (August 23rd) onwards. This runs alongside the current packaging recovery note (PRN) system making it all a bit of a muddle.
Trying to sort the resources from the rubbish is confusing enough, but it’s only one part of the circular economy – a term that everyone has heard but few can explain concisely. Previous research has complained that much of the CE literature constitutes “scholarly bullshit” – that is, scholarship “so pointless and unnecessary that even the scholar producing it cannot justify its existence”.
But new research using 221 CE definitions found that understanding of CE is “both more consolidated and more differentiated”. As one author of the article in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling described it: the trunk of the CE tree has strengthened, while various new leaves have appeared. Consensus has grown regarding the core principles underpinning CE, the academics said, with 70–80% of articles recognising ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’ as the two fundamental principles of CE.
Which brings us to news that the University of Sheffield is looking for people in Yorkshire who have tried reusable packaging, to join a project to investigate ways to combat plastic waste. The aim of the project is to assess how convenient and accessible reusable packaging currently is, what infrastructure is needed to support it, and what skills or habits people need to acquire to reuse packaging in their everyday lives.
And the research projects on packaging keep coming, it seems: the University of Warwick is also running a £13.2m EPSRC research pot aimed at a circular economy for plastics. The Plastics Shaken Up bid will look at everything from behaviour change and eco-design to life cycle assessments and reuse.
Tesco this week announced clear caps on bottles of milk which can be recycled back into bottles (unlike the coloured ones). Tesco’s social media staff were in for a busy week if similar moves by other supermarkets is anything to go by – customers don’t like change. And neither do politicians it seems.
Do check out our other stories this week: a new climate friendly ice-cream launch; researchers determine how to encourage people to eat insects; and more on that Feedback food waste research.
