I work in this area (packaging and waste reduction at a supermarket) and I can assure you that we ARE looking at the issues of plastic and packaging - as both an industry and individual retailers - and have been for some time. But there are a couple of fundamental issues that people keep missing and spurious science touted by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
Firstly, packaging - and plastic packaging - protects the food you buy. Plastic is generally light, thin and inert. It doesn't allow transfer of contaminants to food (which pulp-based packaging can). But most importantly, it reduces food waste in store and in customers' homes. The plastic shrink wrap on your cucumber makes it last five times longer than without. It is 100 TIMES more environmentally damaging to throw away a lettuce than the plastic wrap around it. Think about the water, fertilisers and pesticides used to grow it, the harvesting and pollution transporting from farm to packing to store. If you are interested, visit the Love Food Hate Waste website: www.lovefoodhatewaste.org.
Secondly, the vast majority of ocean plastics (about 75%) come from China. And the rest from India and the Americas. That's not to say the UK shouldn't be doing its bit - of course we should - but eliminating plastics in the UK won't make a dent on the plastics in our oceans. Which is why when Greenpeace launched their campaign to introduce bottle return schemes in the UK as a way to stop plastics in our oceans, it was nonsense - but another nice way for them to beat up the supermarkets.
Interestingly, this week the Government announced England will be introducing a DRS scheme for plastic bottles, glass bottles and aluminium/steel cans (It's already underway in Scotland). It was widely reported that the supermarkets were against that. Not exactly. What we were saying was that the government needs to stop trying to attack single-issue packaging problems and create a system in the UK that works. We have an existing recycling system - local council household collections - and bottles and cans can go in that. But too many consumers still put them in general waste. Now we are going to spend billions on introducing a new scheme rather than making the one we already have work. Local authorities need the revenue from those valuable plastics to make operating kerbside recycling economical.
The recycling infrastructure in the UK is woefully underfunded and underresourced. All plastic packaging is, in theory, recyclable. But we need facilities in the UK, at scale, that can do that. We need local authorities that can pick up, sort and recycle all those plastics - at the moment there is no consistency across the UK to do that. UK retailers already get taxed for the packaging we place on the market each year. Make that work better. Tax us more for unrecyclable packaging and less for recyclable packaging.
Finally, and importantly, at the moment there aren't alternatives with the unique properties of plastic available at scale. There are companies and retailers developing those but it will take time. And compostable packaging is controversial. It can contaminate other waste streams and releases huge amounts of damaging gases as it decomposes. Harvesting and recycling of paper and card is hugely water, energy and chemical intensive. Ironically, far more so than plastic.
So, it's NOT the simple issue it's made out to be. And eliminating plastic won't necessarily be more environmentally beneficial that using it. It's hugely complicated. And it's the Government you should be writing too - not the supermarkets. We're on it.