At Spring Fair (2-5th February), Helena Mansell-Stopher, founder and CEO of Products of Change, took the trade fair attendees through why sustainability is important to business and the consumer, and how they can enact sustainable change now, to safeguard themselves for the future.

There is a lot of change coming in the world of sustainability, began Helena, especially over the next decade, and a lot of it is going to be dependent on us changing our mindset.

“Sustainability isn’t just about innovation or trying to do something good for the planet. Actually, sustainability needs to be rooted into our everyday; we need to change the way we do things. But we find change really hard as a society,” said Helena.

Digital technology, for example, is changing rapidly, and we’ve already seen it over the last twenty or thirty years, and it is only going to continue this way.

Helena then asks the audience whether anyone uses ChatGPT, something which Helena says she uses quite often. Ahead of this presentation, she asked ChatGPT to generate a picture of the future, adding in a list of what she knows is happening in the world. It created a picture that had nods to antibiotic resistance, our mobile phone usage, healthcare revolving around trends and risk in your DNA, remote schooling and working, driverless cars and drones.

“This is a bit dystopian and doom and gloom, but we can take that and look back at what it means for us today. We can look at what our future businesses could look like, and how a lot of this is changing,” Helena said.

Digital currencies and Bitcoin for instance, are something that will only continue to grow in the future, because the majority of the money we spend is digital. “Last year was actually the first time that the UK Treasury did not order any new coins,” explained Helena, citing a sufficient supply of approximately 27 billion coins already in use.

This trend reflects a broader decrease in cash transactions: 39% of UK adults now live largely cashless lives, with research by UK Finance revealing a 7% drop in cash payments in 2023, with only 12% of payments made using cash, down from 14% in 2022.

The Royal Mint is now recovering and repurposing precious metals from electronics and circuit boards. The ‘Pioneering’ facility will extract precious metal from up to 4,000 tonnes of scrap circuit boards a year (similar to the weight of a ten-story building). “So we’re going to start to see businesses change how they operate because they’re looking at that future,” explained Helena.

Envisioning consumers’ future needs

Looking to the future of business was something Dunelm focused on in its presentation at the POC Conference last year.

“We have witnessed climate change firsthand—not just as a concept from a sci-fi movie, but as a reality unfolding in our lifetime. As we share this world with the next generation, we must look ahead, envision how we will live, and create products and services that shape a sustainable future,” said Helena.

Just take the UK climate, which is seeing, and will continue to increasingly see, more frequent flooding, hotter summers, and shorter winters. Even the government is changing the rules on how new houses are going to be built, “to ensure that new homes built from 2025 will produce 75-80% less carbon emissions than homes built under the current Building Regulations” says the Future Homes Standard.

Dunelm are designing sofas that can easily be disassembled and moved upstairs if there is a flooding risks. “They’re looking at the appliances and the type of products that they sell in the store to make sure that this feature is a feature that they can actually provide products to for that future economy,” Helena explained.

Re-evaluating the value of waste

“What we’re doing just cannot happen anymore. So in Europe, approximately five tons of waste per year per person is produced, and that’s equivalent a fully furnished small house. So everybody in this room creates a small house with a waste.

Our waste is responsible for 20% of global methane emissions (50% of which is food waste). We’re also buying 60% more and keeping it for half as long as we did in just 2020.

“And even the products that we produce: 80% of toys end up in landfill, incinerators or the ocean. There’s just nowhere for them to go at the end of their life,” said Helena.

When it comes to plastics, only 14% is collected for recycling, and only 2% of that is actually recycled. Similarly, in 2019, globally, we generated 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste, while only 17.4%was officially documented as collected and recycled.

“But there is a huge amount of value to be had in all of this, we just need to build a system for it,” Helena commented. The International Plan of Climate Change (IPCC) publish a report every two years to showcase their data, and the most recent one showed that the systems we have in place today aren’t slowing global warming down. “So we’ve got a lot to do in the next five to ten years.”

By 2050 we could have a world that has warmed by 3°C, twice as warm as it is today. “A world that is above 3°C is a world that is not insurable. How do you insure businesses and homes if you can’t predict what’s going to happen? That becomes the world where everything is a little bit bonkers, and we don’t want to get to that,” said Helena.

Legislating businesses forward

Regulations on environmental, social & governance (ESG) and environmental, health & safety (EHS) issues are rapidly expanding across regions and sectors to achieve greater transparency and accountability for companies all over the world.

 “In Europe we’re leading,” said Helena, “while the US is backpedalling, which is a worry, considering now that a quarter of products are produced in the American market.”

The European Green Deal is trying to push the circular economy action plan it is implementing, so that when we produce products, we think about the end-of-life of that product and ensure there is a system for that product to go into so we can start to get the value back.

There are also regulations in America, it is not federally, it’s by state. California has the strictest regulations and Asia Pacific has a lot of regulation that’s coming.

“What I really want to highlight is that next year, in 2026, most of the regulation that’s coming down the pipe is hitting those big companies already. It hits the SME market, everybody else really, from 2026 onwards,” Helena explained.

There is also something called the EU tax signing, which means that if you are benefitting and profiting from the sale of a good or service, you are responsible for the environmental impact of it.

And if you are a brand owner there is something called CRSD, which is the corporate social reporting directive, and CSDDD which is the due diligence directive. These cover both your impact as a business, and how you impact others, which links into double materiality. Companies are really starting to have to dig into this.

If you’re a product producer, a couple of years ago you would have had to start paying the plastic tax if you’ve got plastic packaging and don’t use 30% recycled plastic in that packaging. “Now it’s no longer just about plastic packaging,” said Helena, “it’s about all packaging and the level of how easy that packaging can be recycled or reused or has an end-of-life solution.” This is extended producer responsibility (EPR), so that the producer of the products is responsible for making sure that there’s a stream for that packaging to go into. It is already happening, and affecting packaging first.

If you’re not already collecting this data, start, even if it is a really basic Excel spreadsheet, record the weight of plastic that you’re buying, the type of plastic, “because at some point someone is going to ask you for it, whether for your retail, PR, or supply chain, so just start collecting your data somewhere even if it is a really simple system,” Helena encouraged.

With the EU Deforestation Regulation coming around, if you produce paper products, you can no longer just say you are FSC or comply by existing regulations, you are going to have to showcase you know exactly where that paper has come from, the wood the paper is made from, the mix of woods. “If you can’t showcase that, you actually won’t be able to distribute your products in the EU,” said Helena. It was meant to start in December last year but was pushed back 12 months. For this, FSC has developed a new technology called FSC Blockchain, so if you use FSC you can use the Blockchain to get the information and pass that on.

There is also new regulation called the Eco-design for sustainable products regulation (ESPR), which ensures we are designing products for durability and usability, repairability and upgradability, with recycled content than can be recycled, resource efficiency, end-of-life management and a reduced environmental impact.

“And all of this is going to culminate in every single product by 2030 that is distributed into Europe or outside of Europe, having something called a digital product passport (DPP). So unless you put all the data for your product into a DPP then you will not be able to trade in the European Union. We’ve got five years to make sure that we’re collecting our data that’s in the library, so just start working on this,” Helena said.

This kicks into the fashion industry sooner, in 2027, and in the first quarter of 2025 we are due to have the final elements of the legislation publically published, as there is a lot of grey area at the moment.

“We have been working with a company called Fabacus and another of our members, Pure Table Top, to put a DPP on a mug last year for our conference, so you can scan the QR code and it will give you all the information about where it was made, the impact, the company, where it’s come from,” said Helena.

Seizing the opportunities

“It’s not all bad news. We can start to reduce the impact that we have in the environment, so we can continue to try and live the way that we can live in society,” explained Helena, even on an individual level, we can switch the energy in our homes to renewable, use electric cars, wash our clothes in cooler water, reduce how much we fly, reduce the amount of meat and dairy products we consume, all can have a big impact.

“And even the brands and the products that we were working with in can help drive and push change within society as well. Most of us are product producers here, it is the raw materials and goods that you make, the materials that you choose, that is the highest impact,” explained Helena.

A lot of the impact of the product is from its packaging, most of which gets immediately thrown away. “So when we start thinking about the impact of what we’re producing, again, there’s some quite simple things that we can be doing, even in a single business, that when they will add up, they actually add up to have a really positive impact, rather than adding to the issue.”

A company called Dayrize does lifecycle assessments of products without you having to handle the data. With their software, we modelled this polyester top, with a switch to recycled polyester, changing just that one thing, the carbon is reduced by 30%, water by 40% and land by 20%, because you’re using resources that already exist.

“So if there’s one or two things that you can focus on in the business, and you can take away from today, is that there’s a lot that we can be doing that we don’t have to wait for somebody else to approve to do,” said Helena.

Planning for a circular future

At the POC Conference last year, Primark came to showcase what they working on towards circularity. “They’re a mass market retailer, they churn out a lot of products, but even they have to look at their business model, with all the taxes that are coming,” explained Helena. “If they don’t do this, they’re going to have huge fines as a business, but also as a business, they want to be responsible.

“So they’re really looking at circularity, and this at the minute is a new single part of their business. In the next decade, we’re going to see this massively increase. So this isn’t a Selfridges or a high end retailer, this is somebody trying to change the mass market,” Helena said.

“There are a lot of examples of retailers pushing this, so if you’ve got solutions and options, talk to retailers about this,” she continued.

Circularity is designing and creating our clothes, and all products, with the future in mind, so that they can be worn time and time again, given a new life, taking new materials, dissembling them and releasing them for something else.

This takes us from the linear take, break, waste economy, to recycling, which is an energy intensive process that still needs to change massively, but if we can keep the products in circulation, that’s where we need to get to. “And there’s value in that, we’ve seen companies that are making money out of the circular economy,” said Helena.

Circular economy begins with good design, because 80% of a product’s impact is determined at design stage. “We are working with companies that are saving money by doing this, and they’re saying, ‘Why is nobody else doing this?’ Because it feels too hard, but if you get started, you realise you just need to get started,” said Helena.

Possibilities in packaging

POC is launching a Packaging Guide for its Members, “So again, this is thinking, if design is so important, how do we start to give the designers tools to enable them to think differently?” asked Helena.

Rethink/Redesign and Reduce are at the top of the hierarchy, which illustrates that the most critical time to influence the sustainability of packaging is in the conceptual design phase.

Helena added, “Another company that we worked with was able to reduce and totally eradicated single use plastic, they’ve reduced their packaging size so much that they can actually get more products into their cartons, which means they can get more products on the shelf, which actually is giving them a better sell through. So they’re saving money on the packaging and the retailer is happy.”

POC’s projects

POC is a membership organisation to help you on your journey to reduce your environmental impact, explained Helena. We have a media arm and a conference in November, and also an advisory service where we’ve got technical experts in packaging, carbon, transparency, that will help you on your journey. There is also education modules on the site, and a place where members can take part in our Community Hub, “you can talk to others in the same sector as yours, and bounce ideas off each other.”

There is a twice-yearly magazine, and a Future Forecast Report which can be downloaded from the website for free. “You can download that and sit down internally and understand, okay, what does this mean for us? And it will take you through the steps of how to start to reduce your impact in the company,” finished Helena.