The Friday Digest: Don’t go soft on transparency

Transparency has been the watchword for the food industry this week after groups of businesses called respectively for mandatory publication of food waste data and reporting of the proportion of sales generated from unhealthy products (see separate news story).

Campaigners now want to see the same commitment apply to packaging after an investigation found soft plastics collected by leading supermarket chains are not destined to be recycled. Volunteers for the community interest group, Everyday Plastic, distributed a total of 40 tracking devices, disguised within bundles of soft plastic bags and wrappers, across England in the front-of-store collection points of Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores.

Of the trackers whose final destination was able to be ascertained, the results showed that 70% of the soft plastics were incinerated rather than recycled with the rest ending up at recycling facilities that downcycle soft plastic waste into lower value products such as bin bags and carrier bags, most of which were located in Turkey.

It’s long been known that the infrastructure for recycling soft plastics in England is inadequate and it’s hard not to feel a degree of sympathy for retailers trying to encourage households to recycle materials not yet collected at the kerbside. Yet Everyday Plastic, along with collaborator the Environmental Investigation Agency, argued that take-back schemes are being presented as a solution, which in turn is diverting attention from the bigger issue of too much unnecessary plastic packaging being produced.

Sticking with packaging, the four UK administrations have published their revised estimate of fees for the extended producer responsibility scheme. Higher estimates of illustrative base fees have decreased across all materials, with the exception of wood, compared with the first set of fees released in mid-August, however for some materials like aluminium the lower estimate fee has increased.

Next, a new report has highlighted the challenges facing small-scale farmers as they seek to compete with the power of so-called mega-farms. Analysis of EU farm data by Greenpeace EU found a widening divide between small-scale farms (with annual outputs between €2,000 and €49,999), whose numbers dropped by 44% between 2007 and 2022, and mega-farms (with an economic output of over €250,000) which grew by 56% in number. Mega-farms also received a 37% share of the EU’s farming subsidies during the same period, according to the report. 

The trend towards intensity and scale has had a knock-on effect on farming jobs with overall employment on commercial farms in the EU having dropped by 38% between 2007 and 2022. Researchers said the loss of almost two million commercial farms and 3.8 million jobs during the period suggests that the model of small-scale family farming is dying out.

The ability to provide local employment is identified as a key potential benefit from a shift to regenerative agriculture in a new Footprint Intelligence report. Produced in association with Néstle Professional UK & Ireland and launched at a First Milk dairy farm in Cumbria this week, the report found that resurgent interest in regenerative agriculture has the potential to reconnect farms with their communities and deliver lasting social, economic and environmental benefits. It also found that foodservice buyers and supply chain intermediaries can help unlock some of these benefits through their support for regenerative producers.

The report is available to download for free from the Footprint website HERE