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This year Earth Day is focused on plastics, with the theme Planet vs. Plastics.

EARTHDAY.ORG is pushing its message of being “unwavering in our commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health, demanding a 60% reduction in the production of ALL plastics by 2040”.

If you fancy an intro to the issue, it provides a great Plastic Pollution Primer and Action Toolkit

For our part, we’re offering our best ever discount bundle as an Earth Day Pack to get you everything you need to be able to do your refills from home.

40% of plastic use is for plastic packaging, almost all of it single use. The main frameworks seeking to manage this waste come from WRAP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation that have commitments for users of plastic packaging to make 100% of the plastic compostable, reusable or recyclable by 2025. While the first two options (making packaging compostable or reusable) can be effective at reducing plastic waste, they are difficult to attain, so signatures to these commitments focus on making their packaging ‘recyclable’.

But making plastic packaging ‘recyclable’ is of barely any benefit (see earlier posts).

But dig into the footnotes of the commitments and you find a definitional issue that makes them a little farcical.

Here, a plastic is considered ‘recyclable’ if there is a 30% or more post-consumer recycling rate in multiple regions, collectively representing at least 400 million inhabitants^[1].

By picking high recycling countries, like much of the EU and South Korea etc., signatory companies can piece together an area of 400 million people that reach this bar. But 400 million people is just 5% of the world's population.

Across much the world, recycling is very limited and often entirely absent. Allowing plastics recycled at 30% by just 5% of the world's population means that plastics recycled at a global average rate of 1.5% could still qualify as ‘recyclable’.

That’s like getting a passing grade if you get 1.5% on a test.

We found this such a shocking finding that we contacted Ellen MacArthur foundation for confirmation. They confirmed our conclusion, stating:

- About Recyclability, your interpretation is correct. The two criteria serve to identify whether a plastic packaging is recyclable in practice (as opposed to in theory), which is demonstrated to be possible if it crosses the 30% threshold ; and at scale, if it is indeed recycled at, at least, 30% over a significant population. We appreciate this does not mean that the plastic packagings above the threshold get all recycled.

With this definition, we acknowledge that the efforts to recycle lie with different stakeholders at different levels of the value chain and that not everything is in the power of brands putting packaging on the market. However, the definition and target (100% recyclable by 2025) are ambitious enough to hold these same companies responsible and accountable for their part.

So there you have it.

Brands stamp ‘recyclable’ in bold on their packaging and consumers take comfort from it, but companies know it’s largely meaningless and will make little difference.

And all the while WRAP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation provide cover, checking progress against commitments that will not make a dent in plastic use or the amount of plastic that goes to landfill or leaks to the environment.

We need a better framework.

[1] https://emf.thirdlight.com/link/Reporting-Resources-2022/@/preview/2

Here at Refill with LESS, we're all about making it easy to do your refills at home. We think it it’s the most efficient and effective way to prevent plastic waste but also save you money.

It turns out, a bunch of big brand companies think much the same. In their 2023 Global Commitments reports, various companies underlined that refilling at home is the best way.

L’Oreal said:  “refill at home is the most powerful system in term of environmental impact”.

It’s clear too that large consumer goods companies are investing in making larger packs available so that people can refill from home. Here's a selection of what some of them said…

• Colgate: During the next year, it is our goal to focus more on reuse/refill… We plan to continue to offer new products that will allow consumers to refill their packaging at home and partner with organizations working with reuse/refill.
• Reckitt: We have taken learnings from our previous pilots and made plans to scale our latest generation of refill at home products where possible, across more brands and more countries, to increase impact.
• Unilever: To date, our most successful refill formats have been refill-at-home innovations, enabled by concentrated formulas. We have scaled dilute-at-home formats which use significantly less plastic; Cif Eco Refill initially launched in UK and has since expanded across Europe, and our 6x concentrated OMO liquid laundry detergent, has now been rolled out across South America and Australia. Dove Concentrated Body Wash brought dilute-at-home refill formats into Personal Care. It uses 50% less plastic than a standard bottle after two refills.

Hopefully it won't be too long until we can offer some of these brands in refill format.

Check out our sale on everything you need to get going with refills. It includes our Christmas Personal Care Bundle that includes stainless-steel, clear and amber glass bottles, stainless-steel push pumps and a range of personal care products to help you prevent plastic waste and smell wonderful. Perfect for that someone or family that has everything and wants to prevent plastic waste. And it's over 30% off too.

If you follow Bio-D, you may well see our stainless-steel bottles in its social media in coming weeks.

The idea of getting a stainless-steel laundry bottle for life is catching on. Use the bottle with Bio-D’s eco-friendly laundry detergent and it's a smart addition to any laundry room.

You save money on the product and prevent plastic waste. What's not to like?

Check out our stainless-steel laundry bottles here. And if you'd like to order one with Bio-D laundry detergent, we have a choice of Fragrance Free, or its most popular fragrance, Lavender.

Our new new stainless-steel laundry ‘Bottle for Life’ got some press coverage recently!

It was featured in a number of outlets, including the Yorkshire Times and Hull Is This.

All the pieces mention how refilling at home can help consumers prevent a substantial amount of plastic waste. A typical household purchases roughly one plastic laundry detergent bottles each month, creating 12 bottles of plastic waste each and every year. By using the stainless-steel ‘Bottle for Life’ and refilling from home, consumers can prevent this.

The bottle looks great too alognside our hollow stainless steel dosing cup, a UK first!

Learn more and perhaps buy a bottle here.

Our pilot has been going six months, the headline news is that our refill alternative to sachets is working.

We’ve been testing three ways to distribute bulk product and have faced teething problems with all three, but for the most part things have gone extraordinarily well. The solution works well in urban and rural villages and seems especially well suited to low-income household.

After receiving a small free sample, consumers pay the same unit price point as the market leading sachet (Clinic Plus), and bulk distributors purchase from us.

We recently conducted a consumer survey and once these results are processed, we'll come back with further insights. Watch this space!

Refill With LESS is the latest addition to LESS's portfolio. It's an e-commerce site that offers customers the chance to buy stylish non-plastic bottles (glass, stainless-steel) to use time and time again, avoiding the need to keep buying single-use plastic bottles. It also sells the liquid to refill the bottles, from several brands across a range of personal and household care categories. If you're looking to move away from plastic, take a look how we can help you do that, and save you money at the same time.

It's available nationally, with free shipping for orders over £50.

And to help you save even more money, during the month of May we're offering a 15% discount on your first order - just use the the code SAVE15 at checkout.

Come in and look around.

Plastic use amongst CPG companies is rising, despite global commitments to plastic use objectives promoted by Ellen MacArthur Foundation and WRAP. This is because the objectives allow corporations to focus on using ‘recyclable’ plastic and downplay a key strategy that could quickly make a difference: reuse.

Business360 research shows how consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are struggling to make progress reducing their reliance on plastic.

One of the best ways to see this is through the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) Global Commitment Progress Report, the latest data of which runs to 2021 and shows how overall plastic use across brand and retail signatory companies in 2021 is up 5.6% on 2018. Virgin plastic usage went back up to 2018 levels.

Growth in total new plastic packaging since 2018 for some of the large FMCG signatories was much higher, including McCormick (23.1%,), McCain 16.1% and Mars (10.2%), and the two largest users showed strong growth too:  Coca-Cola (8.9%) and PepsiCo (8.7%).

Data for individual FMCG companies also shows continued heavy reliance on virgin fossil fuel-based plastic.

These companies have been focusing on reducing plastic use for years now, and especially virgin plastic, so how can this be?

Some history

Back in 2016 Ellen MacArthur Foundation and World Economic Forum worked to develop the New Plastic Economy as a framework[1] to reduce plastic use. In 2018, and to great fanfare, Ellen MacArthur Foundation promoted the New Plastic Economy, with WRAP promoting its Plastic Pacts ‘enabled by the New Plastics Economy’[2], and companies signed on.

Countries and companies that together represent over 20% of global plastic use committed to plastic use abatement measures with a 2025 deadline.

Signatories agreed to a range of targets:

Signatory companies have been working to meet these targets and each year publish performance data.

But instead of falling, plastic use is rising, so what’s gone wrong?

In our view, this outcome was inevitable because the framework is flawed. The commitments have no limits on overall plastic use and instead allow companies to focus on ‘recyclability’ of plastic packaging, which is of little use.

Authors of the Business360 report predicted a poor outcome in a 2019 article on LinkedIn and since various commentators have questioned the wisdom of these goals. So what’s the problem?

The ‘recyclable’ cop out

Both WRAP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation include the target that ‘100% of plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable, or compostable’. By including these three strategies as options, Ellen MacArthur Foundation/WRAP let signatories choose the easiest, regardless of which best lowers plastic use. And of these three options, two are effective but difficult and one is relatively easy. And you guessed it, the easy one doesn’t lower plastic use at all.

Making packaging reusable so the same packaging is used many times over is a good solution since it lowers overall usage, even if the packaging remains plastic. Reuse also goes hand in hand with reducing plastic packaging since multiple uses can make more costly non-plastic packaging (stainless steel, glass, china etc.) economically viable alternatives. Reuse solutions can for many products quickly and economically prevent 60% of plastic waste and sometimes over 95%. But while making packaging reusable is technically feasible, creating a business model to support it requires rethinking supply chains and changing consumer behaviours. Both are doable but mean companies must change how they do things, adding costs and lowering margins, which they’re reluctant to do.

Having packaging that composts would be a great help, but making packaging compostable remains technically challenging, is a long way from commercial viability and could only ever work for limited use cases.

But making packaging ‘recyclable’ is comparatively easy. There are some challenges, but for the most part it means removing plastics that aren’t recycled and replacing it with types of plastic that are or could be.

Switching out non-recyclable plastic for ‘recyclable’ plastic is a manageable task for corporations and unsurprisingly it's the one they’ve focused on. A massively disproportionate share of the effort by CPG companies is going into ensuring 100% of its plastic packaging is ‘recyclable’.

We see this from the latest Ellen MacArthur Foundation data, which show the strategies companies have used to make progress.

Against the objective of ensuring that ‘100% of plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable’, companies are making incremental progress. In 2021 it stood at 65.4%, up 1.7 points on 2020. But ‘recyclable’ accounts for all the progress; the share of packaging that is compostable remains at zero and the share of packaging that is reusable fell 0.1 points (it’s at such a low base this decline doesn’t affect the overall figures).

But what is ‘recyclable’?

On the surface, making plastic ‘recyclable’ sounds like a laudable goal, but dig a little detail deeper and it becomes a house of cards.

Plastic is considered ‘recyclable’ if there is a 30% or more post-consumer recycling rate in multiple regions, collectively representing at least 400 million inhabitants[3]. By picking high recycling countries, like much of the EU and South Korea etc., signatory companies can piece together an area of 400 million people that reach this bar. But 400 million people is just 5% of the world's population. Across much the world, recycling is very limited and often entirely absent. Allowing plastics recycled at 30% by just 5% of the world's population means that plastics recycled at a global average rate of 1.5% could still qualify as ‘recyclable’.

It's now well-established that most plastic doesn’t get recycled and, globally, its unlikely to exceed 30% this century. OECD says the share of plastic waste successfully recycled was 9% in 2019 and is projected to rise to 17% in 2060[4]. Making plastic ‘recyclable’ is largely meaningless.

But even when plastic gets recycled, it’s not a great help. Recycled plastic usually needs to be blended with a larger amount of virgin plastic before it can be reused, over 99% of which comes from fossil fuels^[5]. Building demand for recycled plastic merely ensures ongoing dependency on fossil fuels.

Brands stamp ‘recyclable’ in bold on their packaging and consumers take comfort from it, but companies know it’ll make no difference.

And all the while WRAP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation provide cover, checking progress against commitments that will not make a dent in plastic use or the amount of plastic that goes to landfill or leaks to the environment.

Time to pivot to reuse

This is an opportunity for WRAP and Ellen MacArthur Foundation to take stock, address their flawed frameworks and refocus on goals that will make a difference.

Specifically, we need targets and corporate commitments for a meaningful and rising share of their products by volume sold through reuse solutions.

[1] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.pdf

[2] https://wrap.org.uk/taking-action/plastic-packaging/initiatives/the-uk-plastics-pact

[3] https://emf.thirdlight.com/link/Reporting-Resources-2022/@/preview/2

[4]  https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/global-plastics-outlook_aa1edf33-en

[5] https://www.ciel.org/issue/fossil-fuels-plastic/

Today we heard that our refill-reuse pilot had been covered in a local paper,  Sakal, a leading Marathi language newspaper in the state of Maharashtra.

We are working on a translation, but meanwhile please enjoy it in its technicolour glory…