My focus this week is the assumption within the legislature that the ‘products’ of the packaging sector, however defined, should always contain a measure of recycled materials. Where general resource efficiency and cost effectiveness apply – we agree.

In fact, for decades these recycling practices have been applied in packaging, largely unsung and unnoticed. The reason? It just makes good business sense to reuse and recycle; from the days of the door step milk bottle to paper and board industries to metals and cans, to utility plastics goods where consumer safety is not compromised.

The recycling model works in all cases where the supply and cost of recycled materials allows them to be factored back into a product, any product, which can then be sold to the consumer at a competitive price. The recyclate and the consumer products sink or swim in a free market in the usual way. Let’s be clear, anything else is doomed.

Today of course, the ancillary aim is to replace the general stock of virgin or new materials with second life materials in products.   No problem whatsoever with that.

However, in keeping an eye on this aim it is not possible, practical or even helpful to make a number of ‘end-use’ sectors responsible for the job – least of all packaging which is not an end use sector at all but a part of all manufactured goods.

All manufacturing – construction; automotive; white and brown goods, healthcare; food and drink – has a self-interested role to play in resource efficiency. More than ever we need to step back and take a holistic view of waste and recycling within the whole economy. In this sense SIC coded divisions within it – and their related recycling targets – are artificial and unhelpful.

There is of course one organic driver to the whole – and that is the consumer. Consumers decide and drive our market economies. They also determine the real appetite for recycled content products by voting with their wallets. And while the consumer appetite for green style products was always a minority interest, it is clear now that even that demand has waned in the last 2/3 years.

Supermarkets have shown us the picture – based on obvious reasons of price, recession and affordability.  Green products – often premium price with recyclate content or messages – are now stocked less. General and supermarketing talk of carbon footprinting and labeling of packaging and products has now largely disappeared – at least in the UK.  Practical considerations, and the huge costs involved, are reasserting themselves.

Our Government – and the wider European framework – should take note. I suggest that new strategies and a new mind set is needed.

Until things change, let’s assume the following:

Consumers, to date at least, cannot be relied upon in any way to drive or guarantee resource efficiency or the uptake of recycled materials other than through usual market forces and conditions.

Producers and manufacturers should not be made to create artificial markets or bear costs for recyclate where it is uncompetitive and unwanted.

We need a fresh and holistic view about resource efficiency in and across all manufacturing and all supply chains.

That would be a start.  And we’re certainly ready to play our full part.

Thanks again

Dick Searle

It’s really not my place to dive into all of the consequences and the material details… wherein the devil lurks. However, I surely will have more than one or two things to say about what happened along the way and what may yet happen.

Consider this aspect for starters: As part of The Packaging Federation submission we noted the part of the Government consultation that said that ‘survey after survey shows that consumers believe packaging is a big environmental problem.’

Oh dear. It’s always a shame when the realm of facts is abandoned for the world of beliefs. In our evidence we simply noted that ‘Packaging is a solution as it saves far more waste than it creates and conserves far more.’

I’ll say it again. Packaging is not product. People buy and consume products not packaging. Packaging is merely the delivery system through which the product moves to reach consumers.

And what about those consumers, their beliefs and the politicians that serve them? For example, does the Government – any government – and its politicians ever have anything critical to say about the level of consumption of goods in this country?

What government today would ever presume to get elected by promising consumers less? – fewer goods? less choice? less consumption? It’s not really a runner is it?

Consumers, by and large, want more and more. At least they believe they do. Governments needing to get elected want to go on promising more and more. They also believe they cannot afford to do otherwise. Until that cycle is ever broken our political model will not change.

The truth is that consumers themselves are the origin and cause of ever-increasing consumption. The material evidence of product delivery solutions merely serves to remind consumers how much they consume. They may not like it, but it’s a fact – however embarrasing and inconvenient.

Many thanks again

Dick Searle

The first reaction for many companies was a twinge of commercial fear and a worry for the status quo. Many others, however, began licking their lips at the prospect of mining the new situation in order to create wider profit margin.

It was commonplace – every week – to attend product launches at which a new environmental solution – usually launched against a hapless  ‘unenvironmental’ situation or industry- was being unveiled. Quite apart from the actual merits of the product itself, the understanding was that all green products were a class apart and needed to be priced as such.

I now forget the rationale – but to those who lived through counter culture ideas of 50′s and 60′s the idea that an alternative world needed to be more costly than Main Street seemed laughable.

However, the last laugh may yet be still on us. The premium-price green product strategy is slipping but the mind set still lingers. Worse still, the green marketing schtick continues to imply that somehow we live in a two-tier material world; the ordinary one – just getting by – and then the virtuous more expensive one, where everything could be greener – we just have to pay more.

It’s time, once again, to get real. Thankfully – and quite apart from the wider green movement now not knowing its own direction or beliefs – some governments, manufacturers and strategists are beginning to think straight.

Matthias Machnig, for one. He is the minister for economics for Thuringia, one of the regional states which makes up the Federal Republic of Germany. He has credentials in both industrial and environmental policy and he recently argues that industrial policy cannot be a policy on its own but must be integrated with environmental policy.

After all, taking a little thought, it is clear that good manufacturing already integrates and gives good environmental performance into its operations and products. How could it not? Why – in a competitive, regulated, visible and transparent market economy – would any manufacturer make an unenvironmental product?  It’s not good business.

Another fundamental question to ask is: How does a free market regulate itself?   The plain answer is the consumer. Choice and pricing are clearly part of the answer and social contract; command and control and subsidy are generally not.

Therefore, the greatest discipline – for manufacturers and most environmentalists together – is effectively to engage the first cog in the economic wheel, namely the customer/consumer on whom the whole system turns. Our politicians seem to be very far detached from this truth and from us, their customers at this moment, but that’s another story.

In the UK we seem to have a political culture that has bought into the idea of a separate, special and alternative environmental industry; one that has been set apart and often subsidised in order to create new environmental technology for new environmental markets.

This was mistaken. Moreover, it won’t work. In fact, the opposite direction needs to be encouraged for prosperity’s sake. Our environmentalists need to take a leaf out of Germany’s book and get fully engaged with UK manufacturing and vica versa. Our UK industrialists and manufacturers need to embrace the open, questioning and innovative dynamic of the environmental movement. UK Government needs to help both sides work together.

Great environmental solutions are part of great manufacturing. Great manufacturing is disciplined to give customers and society the goods and services they want and need at optimum cost. Our policy and strategy should have the two working together as closely and profitably as possible.

Thanks again

Dick Searle

The occasion was the environment seminar of the Foodservice Packaging Assocation, a member trade association of The Packaging Federation. The turnout was very healthy and the sessions were well structured and well organised. All credit to Martin Kersh, FSPA secretary, and FSPA chairman Neil Whittall of Huhtamaki UK for presiding over things.

As I walked to the podium to make The Packaging Federation presentation – the last presentation of the conference – it was clear to me that we were going to enjoy ourselves.  As you might expect, I generally work off a standard powerpoint module to introduce myself, the PF and packaging issues. However, the material is always structured for topicality and ad libbing and I try to make it fresh and new every time.

My Stratford audience certainly thought so – and was sympathetic and appreciative. Sometimes it just takes a thought or the right word to dislodge and articulate the truths that are self-evident. Those who know me will realise that preaching to the converted is something that I try to avoid. However, encouraging our own industry simply to know its strengths and to act upon them is for me a 101 requirement. It’s also a task that, for the sake of reason and common sense, is absolutely necessary.

And oftentimes we simply need a little fun and ‘kiddology’ to get the ball rolling and see the world straight again.  For example – ‘How much packaging do we sell to consumers?’ I am often fond of asking companies. The correct answer is none, of course. Consumers buy products. Packaging is simply the delivery system that brings those products to market.

Thanks to Simon Twilley and PackTV, who were present at the FPA event, these and other messages are now preserved and available over the internet. Simon’s PackTV gives our sector a regular and interesting diet of news and features in a handy format that is designed for our YouTube age.

Some of you will have seen me in this mode and setting. The message is familiar but I make no apology for that. A variety of media formats and offerings are key to keeping our message alive with all. Please do check out Simon’s site at www.packtv.co.uk where you’ll find me under his recent FPA coverage. Enjoy!

Many thanks again

Dick Searle

Twenty years ago you could be forgiven for thinking that the term ‘food security’ represented some branch of the tamper evident packaging world.

Today – as Wikipedia tells us food security ‘refers to the availability of food and one’s access to it.’ It is certain that as our global population grows the food security term will gain more currency – and not in a good way, I fear.

All the more reason, therefore, for our particular industry to remember its fundamental strengths and to be allowed to step up and play a full and creative part in tackling the global food security challenge.

In the UK, our supply chain gets rightly twitchy if, at any point, product wastage figures of over 3% are showing. In some developing economies – and much larger scale than ours – wastage rates of over 40% are the current norm. The problem – and the opportunity – is large scale and if not tackled will sow destructive seeds.

Process and continuous improvement engineers tell us that in any production system the greatest waste can be found in the waste of finished product. Why? Because all the other factors and costs of production involved – the energy; skills; growing time; packaging and so forth – have also been wasted into the bargain.

This fact gives us another reason why the UK’s WRAP-led campaign against food waste is so fundamental and important – and deserves a new lease of life from the Government.

Packaging, of course, is not a product but rather a delivery system, and it has a critical role to play in helping many economies dramatically lower their unacceptable rates of food wastage.

I am certain that – with the right orchestration, imagination and creativity – the combined talents in our sector can do much more to protect the rotting crops and wasted agriculture in fields and factories worldwide.

Food security issues are here to stay, both home and abroad. They will retain a place on my desk for the foreseeable future and the Packaging Federation will play a full part in helping our industry to make a welcome contribution of value. 

Thanks again

Dick Searle

Christmas as usual has been duly enjoyed – despite the untimely and unseemly mid-December own-goal by Grant Shapps MP on how he thinks we should celebrate it.

Plot reversals, turnabouts and unbriefed politicians speaking out of turn are, of course, the perennial stuff of drama. And drama, like it or not, is increasingly the stuff of the media.

However, today’s infotainment often does less than nothing to help serious issues – and does nothing either for common sense or for common purposes such as our national recycling targets.

This month, Government and industry, as planned, are working closely together with each other in order to review and improve our current recycling practices and targets.

From where I sit, both parties are ready and equal for the task. Both are proving to be sensitive to the needs of the supply chain. Both are mostly refraining from ill-informed and ‘flaming’ comments. Both are conscious of the need to not impose further financial burdens on manufacturing margins that the UK can ill afford.

If I was in the hoping or wishing business for 2012 – sadly I’m not – I would ask that our industry and society could be granted a reprieve from headline grabbers and from fundamentalisms of various kinds.

Progress would then be much more assured. We could also deploy fundamentals in exactly the right way.

What are those fundamentals? Let me – without apology – restate them as follows.

• Packaging is a net environmental benefit: It saves much more waste than it produces
• Packaging conserves the resources and products that society wants
• Packaging offers shoppers choice – a variety of goods and a variety of types of goods (brands) – all day, every day.

I am personally looking forward very much this month to helping Defra, BIS and their associates increase the resource efficiency of UK plc with these three simple truths in mind. I hope that they become the cornerstone for our joint continuing and effective work in this area through this year and beyond.

Happy New Year!

Dick Searle

For those of us currently embroiled in the Xmas shopping experience – and perhaps looking this year to take the armchair route out – check this link to a cautionary video tale.

This little piece is actually a healthy reminder of the true purpose of retailing. Systems, options and information technology although they present options and choices – are not shopping. Our day-to-day commercial dealings still need the human touch and are likely to do so for time to come.

Thanks again

Dick Searle

As readers of this column will know, I have become extremely aware of the incapacity of leaders – in politics, society and industry – to properly address matters of consumption. Unsurprisingly, ‘Reduce’ – the first element in the environmental triangle – has taken a back seat in the last twenty years or more.

‘Reduce’ is not a popular theme – and it doesn’t work for politicians: More than one UK MP has bluntly informed me that any politician who goes to the hustings with a voter-message of expect-less and consume-less is set for political hari-kari. I can see how that works for politicians – but for how much longer?

The global credit boom encouraged consumption, expansion and growth-of-a-kind. Indeed the UK’s greenhouse emissions as measured by consumption have actually increased some 30% in the period 1990-2006.

And the credit crunch has unsurprisingly thrown new shapes into the environmental movement. And lately the idea of waste prevention – while not the same as ‘reduce’ or lowered consumption – is currently gaining ground and fits the mood of the current times very well.

There is much to commend the waste prevention approach – especially if it manages to provide any kind of bridgehead or channel to develop consumer responsibility.

DEFRA, WRAP and UK local authorities have all lately combined together in order to help develop a range of social instruments that will give understanding of the benefits of waste production in tonnage, carbon and cost terms.

Indeed our old friend ‘Reduce’ gets a look in as one of the three primary ways – ‘those that prevent the acquisition of waste products by households avoiding their production entirely (eg reducing junk mail)’ Can’t say fairer than that. Other measures include Reuse’ and still others include systems such as home composting in various ways.

At the Packaging Federation we warmly welcome the return of ‘Reduce’ – it being no stranger to the best in packaging and the environmental practices. We look forward to assisting the DEFRA/WRAP work as it goes forward with suggestions and solutions.

Thanks again

Dick Searle

The Sainsbury’s plan is well researched and closely argued. It chimes perfectly with the company’s modest yet strong corporate identity. As a UK citizen, it gives me confidence that one of our leading high street companies is applying so much care, vision and common sense to its sustainable future and to important global issues such as the environment.

And, heck, the new document doesn’t even get to the packaging topic until point 12 (out of 20) in the grand scheme of things.

But to read the subsequent media coverage and reportage of the Sainsburys you might very much think otherwise: The packaging issue manages to make it into the first two paragraphs of most news reports, if not the intro paragraph in every story.

I’m thinking that if Justin King, Ken Morrison or Philip Clarke were in it just for laughs, they may as well wear a checkout bag or a vegetable sack over their heads every time they stepped forward for the media.

Never mind the serious issues of fair trade, deforestation, farming, fisheries, animal welfare, nutrition, fossil fuels, carbon footprint and other important topics that have priority space in this new document. Those things can continue to take a rest while the focus moves back again to packaging.

So let’s get this right – one more time.

• Packaging is a net environmental benefit: It saves much more waste than it produces
• Packaging conserves the resources and products that society wants
• Packaging offers shoppers choice – variety of goods and variety of types of goods (brands) – all day, every day.

Let me assure you that having an issue with consumers, consumption, or with ‘what society wants’, or with the variety and choice of products that society currently enjoys will not be solved by scapegoating packaging.

On the contrary. Take a good look into emerging country marketplaces and the wasteage there. Check on the effectiveness of delivery systems in our own supply chains for measureable and science-based answers.

As the Sainsburys ’20 to 20′ document makes abundantly clear; our leading supermarkets are a vital and central plank of our economy, and contribute greatly to its health. I fail to see how we do these businesses real justice by continually pointing to the usual totemic scapegoat.

Thanks again

Dick Searle

The Packaging Federation’s submission was presented by the due deadline at the end of October and we now wait for outcomes.

The reason for this inquiry? To date, the UK has only been measuring emissions from UK-based producers of goods and services. Now the Government points out that ‘production-based reporting only takes account of emissions produced physically within a particular territory’. If a consumption-based accounting approach was to be used – that is, reporting the carbon embedded in all of the goods and services consumed within the UK – it is very likely that the emissions attributable to the UK would be shown to have been increasing.

Well, yeah, just a bit. Some recent studies suggest that EU consumption emissions have increased some 47% since 1990 and the UK’s consumption emission figures have increased by about 30% in the period 1990 to 2006.

I make therefore make no apology for having put the issue of consumer responsibility front and centre in our recent submission; urging our Government to get on, get out there – and do something about it.

In our submission last month to the Government we stated that ‘there is a clear lack of (political) leadership for consumers on issues of the environment and resource efficiency: There is an overwhelming need for a policy that bases consumer “education” on sound science and information. It is absolutely essential that policies directed at the achievement of real progress on climate change and resource use goals are based only on sound scientific assessment. Consumption-based emissions reporting is an essential tool in achieving accurate assessment of the nation’s true impacts on the global environment.’

Let’s face it, it’s simply not right; morally, or in terms of public resource or even strategy – to just measure a fraction of the whole picture; to bang the drum and tax UK manufacturing while ignoring a 30% rising trend in UK consumption emissions.

This is partly about clinging to the old maps while looking nervously into the territory itself: It recalls the old story of the man who dropped his keys in the front garden on the way to the front door and who busies himself searching under the street light. ‘Why are you looking out here?’ asks a neighbour. ‘It’s obvious – the light’s so much better over here,’ he says.

These issues serve to show us, once again, that clear thinking and fresh leadership is needed if we are to get this at all right. Otherwise, the darkness all around remains very deep.

Thanks again

Dick Searle