by Peter Jones
2 minute read
The Courtauld Commitment has been making headlines this week, as a report from WRAP appeared to show good progress, though not in all respects. But let’s look a little more closely at the numbers and see how well they bear up.
Progress on packaging
Despite sales growth, the 53 signatories made it half way to their 10% target for reducing and recycling packaging. Examples in the report show how bottles and boxes are being made lighter and thinner – which seems to me a genuine improvement. However, for major manufacturers, there are big financial benefits to reducing material usage, so given the impressive technology coming on stream, and the relative ease with which progress has been made, I can’t help but wonder whether the 10% target was sufficiently stretching to drive changes that would not have occurred in any case. And very little improvement was achieved in recycling.
Food for thought
Progress towards reducing domestic food and drink waste has been even better. Having set out to achieve a 4% reduction, three quarters of this has been managed in the first year. But the methodology by which the Courtauld Commitment’s success is being measured is questionable to say the least.
WRAP has simply analysed local authority food waste estimates, found a reduction of 260,000 tonnes between 2009 and 2010, and attributed this to the Courtauld Commitment. This does rather leave aside the range of other factors that may be contributing to a reduction in food waste. Might food price inflation and falling real terms incomes also be having an effect? What about food waste from sources other than the Courtauld signatories? Such things would be difficult to measure – but not to even discuss any of these factors seems deeply problematic.
No chain reaction
Finally, there is a 5% target for reducing supply chain product and packaging waste – something more directly in the control of the Courtauld group. Here, progress is acknowledged to be disappointing at only 0.4%.
So what do we have? A decent achievement on packaging reduction, with clear economic benefits for industry, but no improvement in recycling; a fall in food waste with no obvious connection to the bits of publicity work and tinkering with packaging that the report highlights; and negligible progress on supply chain waste.
There is certainly something admirable about a group of companies taking voluntary action to improve their environmental performance. But the Courtauld Commitment’s progress report has done little to reduce my scepticism about whether voluntary agreements can achieve the level of change that’s needed. If businesses are going to have a real impact on the waste they generate – and maintain it should growth resume – tougher and more binding targets with a wider reach are going to be needed.
Yes, voluntary agreements are a flimsy alternative to real policy but I don’t agree that they’re totally useless. Packaging weight reduction stacks up for all sorts of commercial reasons but its only recently that retailers have started to make efforts in earnest to take the savings that are available. Why? Landfill tax means disposal cost savings are greater than before, but most of this packaging ends up in consumers bins so the savings don’t fall to the retailers. Transport costs have increased with fuel prices, but there were real savings even whe fuel was cheaper. The increase in packaging raw materials might play a part in driving change. My guess is that CSR responsiilities and the Courtauld Commitment will have created some new focus. And now we have a generation of professionals within the major retailers who are starting to carve out careers for themselves by demonstrating how environmental gains can also boost the bottom line. M&S have got some really big financial gains from Plan A. This is really encouraging.
WRAP should be realistic about what they’ve achieved but I dint think it’s fair to say they’ve achieved nothing.