Environment

It's been quite a while since I took my O-Grade Arithmetic but, even so, it struck me that Asda's pledge to return £10m saved by packaging reduction to customers deserved some closer mathematical scrutiny.

£10m equates to £192,000 a week, or £27,430 a day. To put things in context, Asda's US parent, Wal-Mart, generates total sales of £173bn ($354bn) a year, or £474m a day. Not so impressive, is it?

To look at it another way, Asda served more than 20 million customers in the week before Christmas, so the saving would equate to 50p for each of them.

Now, I know in today's retail environment every little helps (whoops, wrong multiple), but in the future, 50p won't even be enough to buy your plastic carrier bags for a week.

Asda's pledge is obviously a good bit of marketing if it's targeting the arithmetically challenged or those who just believe that packaging is bad, full stop.

But it doesn't reflect the growing realisation, even among retailers, that focusing purely on packaging reduction is missing the bigger picture.

The Courtauld Commitment might have prompted retailers and brand owners to carry out some proper analysis of their packaging that would not otherwise have happened, but it's not good enough to look solely at packaging weight.

In a world where consumers are increasingly switched on to recycling and sustainable manufacturing, and the benefits of using recycled content rather than virgin materials, I've yet to see a multiple publicly state that this might not go hand in hand with packaging reduction.

For example, the fibres in recycled cartonboard are shorter than those in virgin material, affecting their strength and meaning boxes have to be made heavier to produce the same strength.

Rather than simply talking about passing on savings from packaging reduction to customers, Asda would be better served highlighting the overall savings to the planet from using more recycled content, notwithstanding the UK's underdeveloped infrastructure for collecting and reprocessing packaging waste.

And while the Waste and Resources Action Programme is currently deep in consultation on the impact of its 25% budget cut, let's hope that when it exits this turbulent period, it reshapes Courtauld to encourage a more sensible approach to packaging that's focused on optimisation rather than reduction.