18 ★ FT Weekend 2 November/3 November 2019
E
very week or two, Magali Sar-
tre, a 44-year-old who lives in
Paris, goes online to grocery
shop. She clicks on orange
juice, olive oil, tea, pasta,
cookies and crackers — a typical order
for herself, her two young children and
her husband, which she tops up with
trips to a nearby organic shop, butcher
and cheesemonger.
But when the delivery arrives, it looks
anything but typical. Packed in a pad-
ded tote bag with thick foam dividers,
the pasta and loose tea are in stainless
steel reusable containers and the orange
juice is in a glass bottle.
There are no plastic bags or ice packs
in sight. Once the family has finished
with an item, the packaging goes back in
the tote for collection, cleaning and —
eventually — refilling.
Sartre is one of the early customers of
Loop, a new company that seeks to
eliminate waste by teaming up with
well-known brands such as Häagen-
Dazs ice cream, Dove soap and Crest
mouthwash to make their packaging
reusable.
Now in trials with tens of thousands of
people in Paris and across the US, the
company aims to create a radicalshop-
ping model in which packaging becomes
durable, reusable, valuable and some-
times even beautiful, instead of some-
thing to be immediately thrown away.
The start-up is working both with
multinationals such as Nestlé, Unilever,
Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo and the
supermarkets that distribute their
wares. The concept appealed to Sartre,
who uses the service to teach her seven-
and nine-year-old children about how
their consumption habits affect the
environment. “I’m pretty militant
about it,” she admits.
“I really want to show as a consumer
that I don’t want any more plastic, and
send a message to big companies that
I’m ready to spend money to back
another model of consumption that is
more in line with my values.”
Sartre is in the vanguard of a burgeon-
ing consumer movement against plastic
packaging that has begun to spur
change at the world’s biggest makers of
food, drink and household products.
Industry executives say that vocal cus-
tomers have pushed concerns about cli-
mate change and pollution up the
agenda to the point where big busi-
nesses can no longer ignore them.Pressure has only intensified since 2017
when the BC nature documentaryB Blue
Planet II showed how staggering
amounts of plastic —eight million tons a
year ccording to the US environmentala
advocacy group Ocean Conservancy —
were ending up in our seas, killing alba-
tross chicks and entangling sea turtles.
In what was soon dubbed the “Blue
Planet ffect”, consumers began to com-e
plain about plastic forks and berate
brands online for what they saw as
excessive packaging. “We can already
see that consumers, especially younger
ones, really care about sustainability
issues, so to remain relevant we need to
change,” says Alan Jope, the chief execu-
tive of Unilever.
But even as green campaigners want
the industry to go further faster, execu-
tives warn that there are real challenges
to reducing our reliance on plastics.
Switching to glass and metal often
means higher greenhouse gas emissions
because of their heavier weight. Plastic
is light, versatile, cheap and durable —
allowing companies to maximise shelf
life while minimising manufacturing
and transport costs.
Roughlya quarter f theo 348m onst fo
annual plastic production worldwide
now goes into packaging, according to
Plastics Europe and UK conservation
charity the Ellen MacArthur Founda-
tion, making it the single biggest use of
the material ahead of buildings, textiles
or transportation.
While the companies, scientists and
entrepreneurs who spoke to the Finan-cial Times agreed change is coming,
they had widely differing views on what
exactly the future should look like.
Some are focused on making the plastic
they use more recyclable. Others
believe materials such as coated paper,
fibre and cardboard could take its place
in many cases. Still others think a more
wholesale transformation of how we
buy and consume products is needed.
Each approach would have radically
different implications in terms of costs,
benefits and convenience, both for com-
panies and consumers.
Entrepreneur Tom Szaky, 37, who
came up with the idea for Loop, became
an authority on waste management
after founding TerraCycle in 2001, a
company in New Jersey that recycles
difficult-to-dispose-of-items on behalf
of big companies. He believes that real
change will come only when people turn
against the very idea of disposability.
“If our mission is to eliminate waste,
then recycling is not the long-term solu-
tion, it is only a Band-Aid,” says Szaky.
“We need to completely rethink our
relationship to products and how we
shop. We need 100 ideas like Loop.”The modern plastics industry began
in 1907, when Belgian chemistLeo Hen-
drik Baekeland nvented the first plastici
resin made of synthetic materials.
Humans had used naturally derived
plastics for thousands of years, making
them out of cellulose from plants, ani-
mal horns and spider silk. But Baeke-feel guilty about the amount of plastic
they use and more than 80 per cent are
actively trying to reduce waste.
In many parts of the world, regulation
is also tightening. Some 127 countries
have placed imits on plastic bagsl , while
theEU will ban range of items by 2021,a
including cutlery, plates and straws. The
UK government has made proposals to
tax packaging hat does not containt
enough recycled content and wants to
make manufacturers responsible for
the full cost of managing their waste.
Nowhere is our collective plastic
addiction more visible than in the
supermarket. Most of Britain’s chains,
including Tesco, Sainsbury and Iceland,
are experimenting with ways to reduce
reliance on disposable plastic packag-
ing. Starting in June,Waitrose ran a test
in its Oxford, store o study the effects oft
removing plastic from 200 product
lines, while encouraging people to bring
in their own containers.
The difference was immediately
apparent in the fruit and vegetable
aisles: fresh lettuce lay in homespun-
looking wooden crates, carrots were
jumbled up in another and tomatoes
were arrayed in cardboard punnets.
Light-green compostable bags were
available for customers to pick out pro-
duce in the quantities they desired.
Nearby was a bulk food section where
customers could buy wine and beer in
refillable jugs, or rice, pasta, beans and
other staples in refillable containers.
Shoppers left feedback on white com-ment cards hung to the wall: “It would
be even better if there were more things
in the bulk section,” wrote one. “Fun-
nels needed for decanting into jars!”
Another welcomed the experiment:
“Really hope you continue and spread to
other stores.”
What did not look all that different,
however, was the middle of the store.
When it came to household products,
biscuits, cereals and pet food, the aisles
remained a festival of plastic.
When big retailers weigh up changing
their shops they have to study the
impact on the entire operation. Will
consumers actually bring in their own
containers or will they see it as a hassle?
How much extra labour is required?
And what about food waste?
The latter is a major concern: about a
third of food produced for human con-
sumption is currently lost or wasted glo-
bally,according to the UN’s Food and
Agriculture Organisation.
Yet there is a disconnect between con-
sumer perception and scientific reality
in this regard. “One ton of food waste
has the impact of three tons of packag-
ing waste when it comes to climate
change,” says Tesco chief executive
Dave Lewis. “So if you start from a place
where you demonise all plastic but then
you waste more food, that will actually
be worse.”
Waitrose is still studying the data
from the Oxford trial and is particularly
interested in its impact on fruit and veg-
etable suppliers. They would have to
make significant changes to how they
pick and pack if the supermarket
decided it wanted to get rid of packaging
in the produce section of all of its stores.
“We spent 25 years in this country build-ing up a supply chain to bring conven-
ience and low prices to consumers,” says
Tor Harris, head of sustainability. “That
is not to say we can’t change it to go back
to how it was before, but we need to rec-
ognise that [such changes] might have
unexpected consequences.”
Other newcomers do not want to wait
for the gatekeepers in the supermarkets
— and their suppliers — to change.
Entrepreneur Angus Grahame came up
with the idea for Splosh, which delivers
concentrated household cleaners, laun-
dry soap and body wash by mail. Since
these are supplied in small plastic
pouches and then diluted at home,
Splosh cuts down plastic and transpor-
tation costs.
Grahame claims the company has
about 20,000 customers and has not
been able to keep up with demand. “We
are a small Welsh company fighting in
an industry of giants with a radically dif-
ferent business model,” he says. “People
are prepared to cut out plastic and do
good for the environment up to the
point where it affects their lifestyle. So
we need to make Splosh appeal to con-
sumers on convenience, price and qual-
ity or it will end up being only for eco-
warrior types.”The challenges of replacing plastic
mean that big consumer goods compa-
nies are putting much of their efforts
into another approach, namely reduc-
ing the environmental impact of the
packaging they do use. That can mean
designing it from the outset so as to
maximise the chances that it will be
recycled, slimming it down to use less
plastic or getting rid of combinations of
materials that are hard to recycle.
Along the banks of Lake Geneva, in
the Swiss town of Lausanne, Nestlé
recently opened a research centre dedi-
cated to the development of what it calls
“functional, safe and environmentally
friendly” packaging.
In laboratories equipped with white
work benches and state of the art chem-
istry equipment, some 50 scientists are
searching for new ways to package
brands such as KitKat chocolate bars,
Perrier water and Purina pet food. They
work with start-ups and outside
experts, as well as packaging compa-
nies that have been Nestlé’s traditional
suppliers.
But the world’s biggest food and drink
company does not see its mission as get-
ting rid of plastic, says Véronique Cre-
mades, head of sustainable packaging.
“We believe there is good plastic and
bad plastic, and making packaging more
recyclable is just as important as mov-
ing to new materials,” she says. “Our
vision is for waste-free futurea here now
Nestlé products end up as litter or in
landfills.”
Like the other consumer goods giants,Continuedonpage 19Plastic packaging is clearly
harming the planet — but it
is also cheap and convenient.
Can anything take its place?
Leila Abboud eportsr
Breaking our
plastic addiction
Below, from left:
a fully
recyclable
and refillable
shampoo bottle
designed by
Marilu Valente
that will be
tested at Aldi
stores next year;
concentrated
refills of
cleaning
products mailed
out by Welsh
company
Splash; a
reusable
container for
Häagen-Dazs
ice cream
made by the
company Loop
Photographs by John Gribbenland’s invention was cheaper, safer and
easier to manufacture.
A Life magazine cover from 1955
shows a family gleefully throwing a
plethora of disposable items above their
heads. “The objects flying through the
air in this picture would take 40 hours
to clean, except that no housewife
need bother,” the text read. “They are
all meant to be thrown away after use.”
An era of convenience beckoned as
companies started churning out dispos-
able nappies, garbage bags and styro-
foam plates.
Today, roughly 6 per cent of global
fossil-fuel consumption goes into mak-
ing plastic, and that is expected to
increase to 20 per cent by 2050, accord-
ing to the International Energy Agency.
Plastic has become the go-to for pack-
aging goods. A cucumber wrapped in
the material lasts two weeks compared
with just three days unwrapped, reports
the Flexible Packaging Association. The
share of plastics in packaging increased
from 17 per cent in 2000 to25 per cent in
2015 , according to the Ellen MacArthur
Foundation, which has done extensive
work on how to fix plastic pollution.
Most of this is used once and dis-
carded — costing $80bn-$120bn annu-
ally and flooding a global recycling sys-
tem that simply cannot handle the stuff.
As footage of theGreat Pacific Gar-
bage Patch nd sea turtles choking ona
plastic straws has spread, people are
taking notice. According toa YouGov
poll from April, nearly half of Britons‘If our mission is to
eliminate waste, then
recycling is not the long-term solution. We need to
completely rethink ourrelationship to products
and how we shop’
Tom Szaky, Loop‘One ton of food waste has
the impact of three tons of
packaging waste. If youstart from a place where
you demonise all plastic butthen you waste more food,
that will be worse’
Dave Lewis, Tesco CEONOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20191/ - 15:19 User:adrian.justins Page Name:WIN18, Part,Page,Edition:WIN , 18, 1