No longer is it purely the role of packaging to protect, preserve and sell a product; the goalposts have moved and the onus is now on all of us to create packaging solutions that save on raw material, cut carbon and where possible reduce costs.
These challenges are particularly pertinent to the dairy industry. Against a backdrop of high methane emissions from dairy cattle, a complex supply chain, forward-thinking retailers and well educated consumers, the industry bodies Dairy UK and the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) came together in 2008 to launch the Dairy Roadmap – an industry-wide blueprint for creating a greener future.
As part of the vision, there has been a strong focus on the role of packaging. After all, the plastic milk bottle is one of the most widely used items of packaging in the country, with around four billion of them being purchased every year in the UK, so it creates a major opportunity for waste reduction, material savings and improved sustainability.
With demanding government targets and an industry striving to reduce its carbon footprint, we have to question who is driving the overall agenda for dairy packaging, and if there are any ways we can make it more efficient?
At the end of the dairy packaging supply chain, we have the consumer. Consumers now recognise that the ‘age of abundance’ is over and wasting resources is no longer an option. Consumers have the power to call for more sustainable packaging, but focusing on the end consumer alone is not necessarily the most efficient route to changing an industry.
Major British supermarkets have their own carbon reduction targets to achieve, as part of the third Courtauld Commitment: to reduce waste and to maximise the amount of recycled content used. Retailers therefore need suppliers to provide them with the most sustainable solution possible, and this means the focus naturally falls on the packaging manufacturers and designers.
However, rather than reacting to pressure from industry stakeholders, manufacturers and designers should be proactively seeking out solutions that save on raw material and cut carbon from the very outset. The sustainable credentials of packaging can no longer be an afterthought – they need to be embedded from the design stage.
Redesigning a classic piece of packaging, as Nampak has already done with the four-pint plastic milk bottle, was undoubtedly a tough brief. We needed to reduce the amount of material used overall and include as much recycled high-density polyethylene (rHDPE) as possible, but without compromising on the robustness of the product.
The Infini bottle has its handle on the corner, a design aspect that independent research has shown many consumers actually prefer. But, importantly, it’s also the decisive factor in ensuring that we can make Infini up to 25% lighter than a standard bottle because we don’t have to force the material as far into each of the bottle’s corners.
Added to this, we also reached a new pinnacle this year, increasing the amount of rHDPE to up to 30%, double that of any other milk bottle on the market. This achievement means that the target of reaching the 30% mark by 2015 – set by Dairy UK and Defra in the Dairy Road Map – has been reached two years ahead of schedule, and it’s estimated that this move will save the industry some 25,000 tonnes of material per annum. Over 250 million Infini bottles have now been sold in the UK from retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons and Waitrose.
With Nampak now licensing Infini to be sold in global markets, this is a great example of true British innovation leading the sustainable packaging agenda for the dairy industry.
Ashwin Moorthy is head of engineering and innovation at Nampak Plastics.
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