Environment

Jennie Price, chief executive of the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), is working hard to persuade brand owners to sign up to the Courtauld Commitment.

Jennie Price (pictured) and environment minister Ben Bradshaw seemed to resonate with consumers last month when they presented an update on the Courtauld Commitment, the landmark agreement that commits retailers to reducing packaging on their products.

Bradshaw’s suggestion that consumers should shed excessive packaging at the supermarket check-out was taken up gleefully by national newspapers and some consumers, to the horror of harassed till operators.

When Packaging News interviews Price almost two weeks later, she says Bradshaw’s comments will lead to more consumer pressure for change.

The Courtauld Commitment, which was agreed and signed by WRAP and 13 leading grocery retailers in July 2005, has set demanding targets: the designing out of packaging waste growth by 2008; an absolute reduction in packaging waste by March 2010; and the identification of ways to tackle food waste.

Progress so far has been solid, but Price, who is a lawyer by profession and has been WRAP chief executive since its inception in 2000, admits there’s a long way to go.

“We have got 35,000 tonnes of actual reduction but we need to do 340,000 tonnes by 2010,” she points out. “That’s a big ask. Carrying on with the pace of change we have now is not enough.

“Retailers have a window of opportunity with customers. In the next year we need to see a lot of products on the shelves that really demonstrate how serious they are.”

Some have already made savings. Tesco is using lighter-weight bottles for spirits, for example, while Marks and Spencer has reduced the weight of ready meal packaging by 30%.

Price detects two distinct camps forming in the packaging community on the issue of packaging reduction.

On the one side, she says, are designers, who are “really, really interested” in achieving reductions.

“If you talk to them about optimum use of materials you get a lot of innovation from them,” she says.

Packaging converters and printers are less enthusiastic, though. “They say ‘if our clients want this we will deliver it, we have to hear from them that it’s a priority’,” Price says.

The decision last month by three of the UK’s leading brand owners, Heinz, Unilever and Northern Foods, to sign the Courtauld Commitment might change this situation.

WRAP had already been working with Heinz to reduce the steel used in its can ends, while Price says she was “very pleased” to sign up Unilever because it has such a wide range of products.

Price says WRAP is also talking to most of the top 20 brands that sell into supermarkets and expects another four or five – “all household names” – to sign up to the Courtauld Commitment in the next six months.

Although the commitment focuses on reducing packaging, the environmental friendliness of materials used in packaging is increasingly occupying a place in consumers’ consciousness.

However, Price says there is “potential for real confusion” about the effects of different types of materials.

“The public thinks that if something is not biodegradable it’s bad,” she says. “But a plastic bottle you can recycle is probably better than biodegradable packaging that will only biodegrade in a commercial composting facility.”

She supports the idea of a national environmental signposting system to clarify the issue, and WRAP has a meeting scheduled with retailers to discuss how to effectively communicate about environmental issues to consumers.

“It’s really important that supermarkets don’t behave as if biodegradables are the way to reduce packaging volumes,” she says. “Reduction has to come first.”

However, Price reveals that supermarkets have largely rejected one idea, that of more in-store dispensing of groceries, which would allow consumers to have more control over the quantities of food they buy.

“It is one of the few occasions we got a totally uniform reaction,” recalls Price. “They all said no.”

That’s an answer Price won’t want to hear too often in the next four years if the Courtauld Commitment is to fulfil its potential.


Courtauld Commitment – progress so far...
Asda 14% material saving by introducing lighter salad bags

Boots 18% less packaging for Botanics shower gel

Marks and Spencer 30% lighter ready meal packaging

Co-op Group cartons removed from tomato puree

More information is available from www.wrap.org.uk