Products of Change’s packaging and materials ambassador, Mike Swain has spent 30 years in the packaging industry, working with the likes of Unilever and P&G before establishing his own packaging expert consultancy to help transform the consumer goods industries.
Ahead of a newly launched Circular Packaging Design course in partnership with Products of Change on 9 March, Mike explores the industry he lives and breathes, and its journey towards a circular economy.
They say that a year is a long time in packaging. And I’ve spent a career in it. But never have things moved at quite a pace as over the last 12 months.
It was back in March 2022 that the EU adopted the first set of Circular Economy measures and published a very long yet very vague proposal for reforming the packaging and packaging waste directives some eight months later in November.
The critics reviews weren’t great.
Here in the UK, meanwhile, the Plastic Packaging Tax was rolled out in April 2022 with the first fees due on 1stApril 2023. Deposit Return Schemes in the UK for beverage packaging have become more detailed and this has triggered some fierce debate between various corners of the industry.
France introduced new Circular Economy Laws in January last year based on the eco-design of products, while Spain has focused on waste reduction regulations, published in March 2022, and a Plastic Tax that took effect in January this year.
Looking at all these major markets, it’s clear that progress is finally being made. But I can’t help but feel that a key principle is missing: the transition to a truly circular economy.
Let’s look at the Ellen McArthur Foundation’s Butterfly Diagram. A key takeout is the need to regenerate natural systems. There’s a huge disparity right now with activity being focused on ‘recycling’ versus using natural systems in which the focus is on biodegradation and composting. Germany, the UK, and Italy are all significantly ahead with biodegradation and composting infrastructure but there remains a lack of understanding on how this can be fully utilised for packaging.
We are simply not making the material impacts required to achieve the underlying goal of all this activity: to protect our environment by preventing a global temperature rise of 1.5ºC by 2050. At COP27, the IPPC reported that if we continue on our current trajectory of emitting greenhouse gasses through burning fossil fuels, we will exceed 1.5ºC in seven to eight years. That really isn’t much time at all.
To have any chance of reversing this, we must all cut our emissions by half, globally, every decade until 2050. And how we do this is surprisingly simple, yet exceptionally challenging.
Step One. We need to reduce emitting greenhouse gasses dramatically. By 2050, we need to be emitting less than 12.5% of what we are emitting now. There is no time to waste.
Step Two. We must protect the natural environment on land and at sea as it absorbs GHGs and acts as a buffer for climate change today and will do in the future.
The conclusion I draw is we simply not approaching this challenge in the right way. Neither are we changing significantly enough what we are doing. And the packaging industry, although not the biggest contributor, plays an important role in this.
The linear economy, as we are most familiar with, is to take, make, and dispose. Our current approach is too heavily reliant on incremental steps in the areas we have the most familiarity with and we are resisting the more impactful, dramatic, and dare I say ‘frightening’ changes we must adopt to make the material changes necessary.
What we are developing is not a circular economy, but a Linear+ economy, particularly for packaging. We take a little less than we did before, make a little different than the last time, use it again if it’s convenient, and dispose of it responsibly as it ‘makes us feel better.’
Our current priorities of recycling materials, light-weighting, down-sizing, and substituting materials or ‘exiting plastic’ are all activities within this but are not achieving the material impacts needed.
We are taking the easier route. A step in the right direction, but not the whole journey.
We ought to be challenging ourselves more to develop a truly circular economy for packaging. We know this to be through restorative and renewable material sourcing, designing and manufacturing with the whole system in mind, inclusive designs that materially and conveniently retain value, and continuous closed loop systems.
These require systemic change involving taking a more difficult, but ultimately a longer-term route with new tools, technologies, and continuously improved methods.
When it comes to packaging’s journey to the circular economy, there’s a lot to unpack.
Mike Swain will be leading a newly launched Circular Packaging Design Course for anyone in the consumer products sector whose job role touches packaging. The two-day course will kick off with a three hour online session on 9 March, to be followed by an in-person full-day workshop held in central London on 14 March.
Products of Change members can receive a 20% discount on the course price. More details and how to register for the course can be found here.
