Enough to give the greens indigestion

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : 15 Oct 2002 16:23

The Eurocrats have had another go at the packaging industry.
But they seem unmoved. John Dwyer wonders why

The promoters of a waste-reduction project bragged recently that it had already saved enough energy ‘to light every home in the US for half an hour’. We are not told how much light each home gets. But even a candle apiece would be impressive.

The green lobby, however, is less likely to praise the project than to pan it. Why? Because it’s merely part of Smith-Kline Beecham’s day to day effort to stay competitive.

All SB did was put its Tums antacid product into lighter bottles. This reduced their weight by 10 to 36 per cent, saving 156 tonnes of packaging a year in the US. Add in less energy to move the products about and, bingo, each house gets its lighting.

We should not be surprised that some global companies lead efforts to reduce waste and energy consumption. After all, the multinationals developed their approach to packaging long before either they or the rest of us realised just how much waste it created. They led us out there, and only they can lead us back.

Packaging now poses a particularly knotty problem for the UK government. The UK’s £9 billion sales of packaging and packaging materials represent 3.5 per cent of the world market. Pira - the Printing Industry Research Ass-ociation when it had a sensible name - notes that ‘in terms of absolute volumes the UK has been one of the major contributors to growth in packaging demand in Europe’. (A mixed blessing unless you work in the industry, but then only the packaging industry could describe recent increases in Russian vodka consumption as ‘an improvement’.) The industry is one of our largest manufacturing sectors. No wonder UK politicians didn’t want the EU to toughen its stance on recycling.

But they also know we’re all running out of landfill. We recover about half our waste but recycle even less. And even the recycling is wasteful. A recent Commons debate noted that we export plastics waste to China and import it from Belgium.

Which explains the muted reaction to the European Parliament’s vote early in September to increase recy-cling targets from 45 per cent to 65 per cent of all waste. Some in Whitehall might even have breathed a sigh of relief. If any UK packaging manufacturer now complains about regulation, the minister can sigh in agreement, adding, “You’re so right, but it’s out of our hands.”

Not that the industry seems too upset. Pira predicts that there won’t be less packaging. It will just be lighter. They still put growth at three per cent a year: “The opportunities appear to outweigh the potential hazards [and] the potential for strong added-value growth remains high.”

This seems complacent. However you look at it, packaging and energy consumption are two of industry’s PR weak spots. Whatever the employment implications of cutting waste, we can all identify with the environment spokes-man who said: “We are drowning in a sea of milk cartons, hairspray and coke cans and awash with pizza boxes and wine bottles.”

We know this waste would not be there unless it had gone through a consumer first. Nevertheless, even the SB example shows that multinationals have a fight on their hands to satisfy increasing demands for them to toe the environmental line. The greens will not be slow to find another way of looking at SB’s Tums project, which is that, if scrapping 156 tonnes of packaging from one indigestion remedy can light every home in the US, how much energy does it take to make a car? Or even a simple thing like a packet of biscuits? And are they worth it? Especially if you have to top off the biscuits with a Tum.

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