Gareth Callan, UK Packaging Sustainability Lead at PepsiCo, and James Marsh, Senior Packaging Specialist at Nestlé, are both part of the Flexible Plastics Fund as brand partners.
Robbie Staniforth, Innovation and Policy Director at Ecosurety, heads the team which pulled the whole project together alongside RECOUP, Suez and WRAP.
The trials were run over three years ahead of the mandatory kerbside collection of flexible plastics as part of Simpler Recycling.
The resulting report was released yesterday at a launch event in the Houses of Parliament and shows positive signs for the future of flexible plastic collections. The trio explain some of the challenges they faced in the early days.
Q: How does it feel to see three years of work finally come together?
Robbie Staniforth: It’s a really exciting day. When we started, the intentions were quite small and humble. But we’ve now seen 10 local authorities trial the collection of these soft plastics in different ways. We have shown that flexible plastics can be collected from all types of different households in different areas across England and the UK. It’s a celebratory moment after three years of hard work.
Q: What contributed to the exponential growth of the project?
Staniforth: I think there was definitely a tipping point in convincing the first couple of local authorities that we were here with a chequebook to fully fund all of the collections – including the use of plastic bags to collect some of the material. I think that tipping point happened after a few local authorities realised that we were in it for the long run, with the intention of continuing to fund them beyond the trial and transition them from what was a voluntary activity into the mandatory EPR.
And I’m really pleased that we’ve kept those promises. We have spoken with PackUK and have helped them to do the modelling to make sure that after the actual FlexCollect project itself winds down that those local authorities will still get collections of their plastics.
Q: Do you feel that this project has gone a long way to encourage local authorities and give them a lot of confidence that the collection of flexible plastics is going to be easier than expected?
James Marsh: Yeah, I think so. I mean, when you look at the presentation that we’ve just seen, it’s easier than I think all of us thought to collect from the kerbside, sort them at the Material Recovery Facilities, and ultimately recycle them. That’s the tricky part. But I think we’ve demonstrated that this can be done, and it feels a little bit like Christmas. We’re really excited that everybody else is getting to know what we’ve kind of known for a while now. So yeah, it feels really, really good today.
Gareth Callan: The key here was finding a methodology that worked and reassuring people that we were going to fund it, that we were serious about doing it, and that it wasn’t just something where we were going to set up some expectations and then disappoint their constituents. So – and Robbie’s already touched on it – that follow through, was critical. Once we started to see that momentum build, and people saw that we were finding solutions to overcome some of the challenges with their collection systems, momentum really started.
I’d hesitate to say that it was easy, because in the early days I don’t think it was. But we have, over time and with perseverance, developed a model of success which has then built momentum.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about some of the challenges you had to overcome in the early days?
Staniforth: At the beginning, we had to cast the net really wide and speak to lots of different local authorities, predominantly through Suez. This also included the brand partners who had to lend a hand to try and find amenable and forward-thinking local authorities who were prepared to get involved in something a little bit risky. It was out of the ordinary, and understandably they were thinking “what have I got to lose” rather than “what have I got to gain.” So, I think one of the initial challenges was getting people to see that this was a huge opportunity.
More specifically, it’s the realities of getting new projects signed off in local government. The honest truth is, just like the brands having to jump through hoops to make sure that they can secure the funding, the local authorities have to jump through hoops to make sure that their local councillors support the initiative. Even though they’re not trying to secure funding because we provided all of that and they’re also not doing all of the logistical work because Suez lent a hand with that. But they did still need to commit to getting involved.
There were local authorities who really, really, really wanted to do it, but – for logistical and administrative reasons – they just weren’t able to get it signed off.
Those were some of the things in the early days when we asked ourselves if this was actually going to happen. And slowly, as we got one or two signed up and the contracts were in place that gave them, then things sped up and became a lot easier.
Q: From a PepsiCo and Nestlé perspective, what convinced you that you had to be involved in those early days?
Callan: From a PepsiCo perspective, we know that we need to generate a circular economy for packaging. That’s what our consumers expect of us. They don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we know that they want us to do it. As a business, and I think I can speak for all of the partners in the Flexible Plastics Fund, we recognize that a future using flexible packaging must be one that involves circularity. The key challenge for us, of course, as brand owners who mainly make food, is food contact circularity as well.
I don’t think it was ever a question for us that we had to find a solution to this. I think the challenge was more about how to do it and how to find the people with sufficient curiosity to explore this with us with a test-and-learn mentality. Because we didn’t know that we were going to be successful. We just felt that we had to give it a go and to try and blaze a trail that others could follow with a viable model. So, I think from our point of view, that was the mindset we have a responsibility to try and solve this, but we recognize that we need to solve it together.
Marsh: I’d agree. And, from a Nestlé point of view, it’s kind of built into our packaging strategy and DNA. We have a long-term vision that none of our packaging should end up in landfill or as litter, and we know that’s very ambitious vision, but we can’t achieve that without doing these types of projects. It was really important for us to invest in this project because it represents a significant part of our portfolio, and we have to find a solution to it.
Q: This report comes just under a year after a damaging report which made national news where air tags were put into flexible plastics that were dropped off at supermarkets and then tracked. The report claimed that none of the plastics were “closed-loop recycled”.
Do you think that there’s a lot of work to be done in repairing the consumer relationship when it comes to the recycling?
Staniforth: I think engagement from the public continues with supermarket collections, and actually, that didn’t really stop momentum among the willing public. Through the retailer programme, we didn’t see any drop off of material as a consequence of that report.
So, I don’t think there’s really trust to rebuild because – although we might think of that in recycling circles as being common knowledge – the average person hasn’t really engaged with it.
I anticipate that most citizens in the UK will just be excited to get it out of their general waste bin and into an actual recycling option. They’ve become so used to recycling every other packaging format that it most likely bemuses them that they still have to put flexible plastic packaging into the bin that they know goes off to get burnt or to landfill, and that will be stopping very soon.
Callan: There is another part of the Flexible Plastic Fund which works with retailers on front of store collection. We’ve worked really hard with the retailers that we’re collaborating with to make sure that we’ve got active traceability systems in place. We’ve actually developed that system with Ecosurety, so that when a bale of waste gets generated and we fund it, that we’ve actually got active tracking that shows where that has gone.
I think you’re alluding to traceability, right? And traceability is going to be really important. At the moment, because of its policy structure, the UK has plastics infrastructure which is pretty open. You’re pointing towards some of those challenges, and we need to develop these new kind of traceability systems to give consumers confidence that it is possible to track this stuff and to know where it ends its life.
The next stage of the project for us as brand owners is to try and work with government and the rest of industry to figure out how can we get this stuff recycled in the UK – what would need to be true for that to happen? Because we know that the closer we keep it, the easier it’s going to be for it to have that end of life that we’re all looking for.
But we have to explore the system economics and understand why that’s not happening at the moment. So, it is a challenge, but I think there’s been huge steps made towards addressing it in the interim.
Q: Do you think a possible solution would be increasing the Plastic Packaging Tax threshold from where it currently sits at 30% mandatory recycled content?
Callan: I think there is a whole suite of different levers available in the policy space.
First of all, we’ve got EPR which is nascent at the moment in terms of its full execution. We need to understand how that works in more detail and what an efficient and effective service looks like.
We have the Plastic Packaging Tax, which was designed and geared for mechanical recycling – more likely of rigids, not for food contact, flexible packaging. So, we need to continue to understand what would need to be true for that to become a successful policy lever.
We’ve got the Emissions Trading Scheme which is going to incentivise the removal of plastics from waste-to-energy streams.
And then in Europe, we also have a minimum recycled content policy, and all of those are going to intermesh with one another to create the kind of environment necessary for more flexible food contact recycling to emerge.
It’s going to take careful exploration of that with various governments to understand what the key policy levers are and at what level do they need to be set.
So, my view is it’s not quite as simple as just one tool. It’s a sequence and a suite of incentives to create that future economy that we need.
Q: Moving back to the FlexCollect report itself, did anyone have anything that really surprised them about the results?
Marsh: For me, the consumer engagement has been really strong, the amount of material that we’ve collected has been good, clean quality. It gives us a lot of hope that as this is rolled out to further local authorities under Simpler Recycling we will really be able to collect good quality material, and the focus will be on delivering recyclability to end markets.
Staniforth: I think the thing that surprised me most, and I was pleased to see, is that no matter how waste is currently being collected for recycling in local authorities, it’s possible to bolt on the collection of flexible plastics.
I wondered at the outset if there was one collection methodology that just might not work and might be too difficult, too expensive. But the report has shown that no matter what you’re currently doing, there is a way to include flexible plastic.
Whether that be having a thicker bag to collect it in, so that it can be treated in a sort of commingled environment and be mixed in with other materials, or actually a thinner bag because you’re collecting it in a clean stream which is sorted at the kerbside, or through twin stream. In all three of those dynamics, it is possible to recycle it.
That’s definitely something that kind of surprised me. I was worried at the outset that there might just be one of those that just didn’t mesh with this new material to recycle.
Callan: We’ve touched on it already, but the enthusiasm that’s come through from the local authorities and the waste management companies in engaging with the project once we’d reached that initial tipping point was really encouraging.
And what I’m taking away from this stage of the work, is that as we head towards EPR, I think there’s a really positive atmosphere of engagement with the waste management companies and with local authorities. We want to find ways to solve this problem and once we established the toolkit that we needed, lots more people were very interested. I think that bodes very well for the future.
Marsh: I’ll add how well we all worked together as competitors, which was really interesting and engaging.
Callan: And not without its challenges! Ecosurety did a great job in facilitating it all.
Ultimately, this is an area where we want to work together as it’s a problem that we all want to solve.
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