PRODUCT AND PACKAGING SUSTAINABILITY

Making packaging sustainable via design

The packaging industry has been vilified over the years, not least on the subject of plastic bags. Yet brands have always been looking for ways to reduce materials and maximise packaging for both environmental and financial reasons.

Designers have helped product makers and retailers improve the environmental impact of the packaging they use by:

• designing packs to me made from sustainable materials. For instance using cardboard from FSC forests instead of unknown sources.
• redesigning without material combinations so that packaging can be easily recycled. For instance making bottle lids from the same plastic as the body.
• changing the way packaging functions so that it improves the sustainability of the whole system it is part of. For instance, designing shelf ready packaging that means less materials are used in transit and at point of sale.

Courtauld Commitment

The Courtauld Commitment was introduced in July 2005 by the government's Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap). Courtauld is a voluntary agreement between grocery retailers and brand owners, which set out to design out weight from packaging waste. Over 40 major brand owners and retailers, representing 92% of the grocery retail sector in the UK, signed up to the first stage of the agreement.

The original signatories worked with Wrap on a number of projects to reduce the amount of amount of materials used in packaging and optimise packaging.

e scheme won praise from the industry for its Love Food Hate Waste campaign, which focused on the greater problem of food waste and how packaging can help reduce this.

Wrap launched the second stage of the agreement in March 2010. Courtauld 2 moves away from weigh-based targets to a focus on sustainable resource use. CC2’s three main targets are set for 2012, based on 2009 data:

• A 10% reduction in grocery packaging
• A 4% reduction for household food and waste
• A 5% reduction for product and packaging waste in the supply chain.

Carbon labels

Carbon footprint labels are designed as a metric outlining the carbon emissions of a product. Debate has arisen surrounding the issue of where the measurement starts and stops. In many cases the energy required to use a product, for example shampoo, produces a bigger carbon emission than that produced from the manufacture of the packaging. It has also been questioned whether consumers understand what the labels mean. Only a handful of brands and retailers have put the carbon footprint on their packs to date, Walkers crisps and Tesco being the most prominent.

PAS 2050

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n 2008, the British Standards Institute launched PAS 2050, a publicly available standard, or a consistent method for assessing greenhouse gas emissions across the lifecycle of a product.

Tesco

Tesco introduced carbon labels to 30 products in its range in 2008, including orange juice, light bulbs, laundry, potatoes and tomatoes. The grocery retailer has since labelled 120 own-brand products and expects to have footprinted 500 products by the end of the year. Tesco’s carbon labels include information on how to reduce a product's carbon footprint when you cook it, use it or dispose of it and in some cases it will tell you how it compares to similar products.

BRC label

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) launched the BRC Label in March 2009 with the support of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap). The label simply and clearly states which parts of the pack are:

• Widely recycled
• Sometimes recycled - check with your local authority to see if they are recycled in your area
• Not currently recycled

The aim of the scheme is to help consumers recycle more packaging and to help local authorities to increase recycling rates, especially for materials that can be recycled, but currently have low recycling rates. The BRC established the independent advisory service OPRI to advise on the UK-wide label, which is aimed at private label and own-brand owners.

Sustainable guidance for designers

INCPEN, the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment says: 'Packaging has a key role to play in helping society live more sustainably. It is a crucial part of the system for delivering products from their point of production to their point of consumption. We already have policies on Sustainable Production and Consumption. The link between production and consumption is distribution, and packaging’s role in Sustainable Distribution is vital.'

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