The next step

Single-use vs multiple-use

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Reusable packaging target

Plastic pacts

Businesses are under pressure to tackle their use of packaging , especially plastics. Some have set targets to remove all plastic, others to reduce the amount they use and many more to use readily recycled plastic polymers. This has led to quite a bit of substituting materials, e.g. paper instead of plastic.

Confusing. Whether such swaps are really sustainable is debatable. For example, plastic can have a lower carbon footprint than aluminium, but the latter is often easier to recycle. Cardboard can seem pretty good until you start looking at its water footprint. There are very few silver bullets and all the different single-use packaging suppliers are fighting their corner. So is reusable packaging the best option?

Reusables

Some studies have shown that single-use packaging has a lower environmental impact than reusable packaging. But these are usually commissioned by those with a vested interest in single-use and the results can be spun by PR teams. Others have shown that reuse wins out. A paper published in July 2021 in the journal Sustainable Consumption and Production, showed that “reusable containers outperform single-use plastic containers on most measures of environmental impact” .

The experts found that after fewer than five uses the plastic reuse containers won out over single-use in terms of carbon. The steel ones had to be used between 13 and 33 times (see The next step ).

Tip. If you are looking in detail at studies comparing single-use with reusable options for your packaging then focus on those that detail the life cycle assessments in full.

Slow progress

If you haven’t yet made any progress on reusable packaging it’s still early days and for many products there aren’t yet solutions or concepts in place. The big consumer goods companies are doing a number of trials with reuse and refill but across all the large corporates signed up to the global Plastics Pact network run by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, just 1.9% is reusable. In other words, they are still just swapping to different single-use materials or polymers.

Note. In the Plastics Pact run by the charity WRAP, signatories were recently consulted about introducing a reuse/refill target. However, this now seems unlikely to happen.

Should you set a target?

Setting a target, e.g. “20% reusable by 2025”, is tricky. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering this kind of packaging . Single-use packaging is rising in price, and will continue to do so thanks to a range of new policies like the plastic tax and extended producer responsibility, so reuse could save you money and go down well with customers.

Tip. Don’t worry about setting a target for reusable packaging yet. If some of your products allow for reuse then you could run a trial with one or two of your customers to see how it goes.

For a link to the paper, visit https://www.tips-and-advice.co.uk , Download Zone, year 16, issue 03.