
Towards sustainable packaging materials: Examining the relative impact of materials in the natural source water and soft drinks value chain
This report examines the impact of packaging materials for natural source water and soft drinks. The materials examined include plastic bottles, aluminium cans, glass bottles and multi-material cartons. To reduce impact, findings highlight that businesses should increase circularity and levels of recycled material for all material types.
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OVERVIEW
This report provides recommendations for businesses and government to help address the issue of eliminating plastic waste. The publication examines how companies from the natural water and soft drinks sector can adopt a considered approach in their future packaging material decision-making.
Recognising that collaborative actions from business, government and society are needed to address the issue of plastic packaging waste, the authors lay out how stakeholders across the natural source water and soft drinks value chain could work together, and with others, to achieve zero plastic packaging waste from UK water and soft drinks by 2030. The roadmap includes four pathways:
- An efficient and circular resource management system for bottled water and soft drinks packaging
- Standardised lowest impact material used for all bottled water and soft drinks packaging
- Significant shift in consumer behaviour and societal norms
- Alternative bottled water and soft drinks delivery models explored and implemented
When examining the relative impact of materials across three key metrics: water usage, carbon emissions and circularity (recycling rates and recycled content), not one material came out clearly as having the lowest relative impact in the areas examined. Further to this, the analysis found that developing more circular systems, particularly to increase levels of recycling and the use of recycled content, can reduce the impact of all materials. This presents an opportunity for businesses to work collaboratively with government and key stakeholders to increase the circularity of all packaging material types across the natural source water and soft drinks value chains.
However, the analysis also found several challenges, both in the approaches to measurement and in the methodologies used and data availability. These are set out below:
- Decisions on packaging made in business can be prone to subjective judgements
- Lack of common metrics undermines attempts to align decision-making with an evidence-based approach
- There is a lack of standardised measurement and consistent reporting
In addressing these issues, the natural source water and soft drinks sector has the opportunity to lead in developing collaborative approaches, drawing in other key stakeholders who use or produce packaging.
When considering what approach to take, this report suggests businesses in the water and soft drinks value chain should:
- Carefully consider all the impacts of a potential packaging material
- Seek agreement on key impact metrics
- Ensure key impact metrics are evidence-based
- Align with long-term goals
- Participate in sector-level collaboration
To explore how businesses can work to address some of the challenges and opportunities this report identifies the following next steps to take this work forward:
- Assess whether current business targets on packaging support long-term targets
- Support the sector to identify and agree on consistent impact metrics
- Inform academic research that could model future impacts of materials
KEY INSIGHTS
- To create a value chain where zero plastic packaging waste is sent to landfill or escapes into the natural environment, more circular systems must be created.
- The desired outcome is to ensure that through agreed goals and dynamic industry standards, soft drinks are only put on the market in the best packaging available that can be recycled or reused, but that also has the lowest environmental impact.
- There is a need for independent, publicly available, academically rigorous research comparing the holistic impacts of different material choices to support business and consumer decision-making, both in the current context and to leverage innovations in the future.
- When considering what approach to take in their packaging material decision-making, businesses in the water and soft drinks value chain should carefully consider all the impacts of potential packaging material, seek agreement on key impact metrics, and align with long-term goals.
- When examining water intensity from production, glass has relatively significantly higher water usage per unit. For a 500ml glass bottle, the volume would be 4300ml.
- When examining carbon emissions from production, while some of the materials like glass and aluminium have much higher emissions if produced using 100 per cent raw materials, their emissions reduce significantly if production could be undertaken using 100 per cent recycled material.
- While there are relatively high collection rates for most of the packaging materials, more focus needs to be placed on increasing recycled content in materials and on the availability of information about this.
- There is a lack of adequate comparable reporting of recycled content for all packaging materials.
- Collaboration is key to developing a consistent, agreed approach across industry and business to measuring and reporting the relative impact of materials.
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