The UK supermarket Sainsbury’s has been accused of rendering its meat “vile”, by using a new form of vacuum packaging. Sainsbury’s claims this is intended to reduce plastic waste, as this method of packaging halves the amount of packing needed. But customers seems to think it leaves the meat too heavily compressed. As one shopper stated “it feels very medical – like I’ve just bought someone’s kidney to cook at home”. The company has also been warned that this new form of packaging isn’t generally accepted for recycling across the UK.
Firstly I’d note that, by chance, I happened to buy some meat from Sainsbury’s in this packaging and I don’t know what the fuss was about (I don’t eat mince meat that often, I just assumed this is how they package it these days, but seriously do people not know what meat looks like!). I was planning to make some savoury Irish mince for Easter. I’ve found that vegetarian meat substitutes work okay for things like Bolognese or chilli con carne (in fact I find they are better at absorbing the spices), but not for savoury mince (its an Irish thing I suppose). So I experimented this time with half and half (half real meat & half veggie quorn) and honestly you couldn’t tell the difference (between the meat and the veggie stuff). How it was packaged I didn’t really notice, until I read the news.
But either way, is Sainsbury’s right to use this new packaging, even if a lot of it ends up going into general waste? Well firstly we have to acknowledge that a lot of plastic doesn’t get recycled. While you will hear figures bounded around of 45 – 56% of UK plastic being collected for recycling, in reality most of it ends up being incinerated or ends up in landfill. Exact figures are hard to come by, this BBC piece suggests that while Germany collects 99% of its plastic waste only 39% is actually recycled. In the UK its been suggested that as little as 12% can actually be confirmed as being recycled.
There are several reasons for this. The complex nature of the different types of plastic, some of which are easily recycled, but in other cases can’t be (either for practical reasons or because of the chemical composition of the plastic). Or they have to go through a down-cycling process into other products (which then can’t recycled). Also there is the problem of contamination, either by someone putting too much of the wrong kind of plastic in the wrong bin, or the plastic being too dirty and contaminated (you are supposed to wash out plastic trays and remove the labels before putting it in the recycle bin and some people don’t do that). So on that basis Sainsbury’s policy does make sense.
Incineration of plastic is something I’ve discussed before. On the one hand, yes it disposes of the problem, we don’t need to worry about the plastic choking dolphin’s or sea birds if its been burnt. And you are recovering some of the energy spent manufacturing the plastic in the first place. On the other hand, its not a sustainable solution. You are basically running a low grade fossil fuel plant (with substantial carbon emissions) off of a fuel whose supply will disappear once all the oil is gone.
So what about using more sustainable forms of packaging, cardboard for example? Well the issues here are the same as with plastics. Is the alternative going to be any easier to recycle? What about contamination? (e.g. if it goes into the recycle bin filthy and covered in rotting food). Can it provide the same level of food preservation, without compromising its recyclability? (e.g. we add a thin layer of plastic to cut down on food deterioration and that could render it non-recyclable).
But why not just skip the packaging altogether? While that is possible, in fact there are shops that do that, however its important to remember that packaging performs three main purposes. To protect the food from supermarket to home, but also to protect it from factory to the supermarket, as well as while its sitting on the shelf. Given that food has a carbon footprint as well (meat having a particularly high one), even a small increase in food spoilage will wipe out any environmental gains of using less or no packaging.
What about using reusable containers? Back in the old days, you’d take your empty glass bottles back and get a refund on them. This requires having reversible logistics. In other words when the truck drops off the load, it picks up the empty containers and returns them to the factory. Now if you’ve a relatively short supply chain, e.g. you are picking up from a bottling plant down the road, that’s not a problem. Hence for certain products in some countries it does work, subject to the right legislation, as companies are unlikely to volunteer to do this. And unsurprisingly the UK doesn’t have that, although the Scottish Parliament is trying to change that with a returnable bottle scheme (which of course the Tories, forever in the pocket of big business, are attempting to block).
Of course if you have much longer supply chains, e.g. getting fruit from southern Spain to the UK (which post-brexit may mean checks, which the empty containers will now have to go through on the way back), it might not be feasible. That said, there’s ways it could be made to work for quite a number of products, with the right legislation (such as a tax on unrecyclable plastic containers).
Also we’d need to be sure the empty packaging gets returned in a reusable state. For example there used to be a shop near me that did growler beers (they’d sell you craft beer in reusable 1-3L bottles). Anyway, their biggest problem was that the bottles would often come back filthy (e.g. fill with mould or cigarette ends) and the customers would still feel entitled to a refund!
Plus moving around all of these containers will have both a financial cost and an environmental cost. Glass bottles are heavier than plastic ones and thus it will take more fuel and release more CO2 moving them around. In fact one of the first applications of Life Cycle Analysis was undertaken by Coca Cola into using plastic bottles instead of glass bottles. This study (and similar ones since then) have showed that unless you are getting a fairly high rate of reuse out of a glass container and your supply chains are short, plastic can work out better. Although that does depend on the rates of plastic recycling (like I said, there’s a big difference between the amount of plastic collected and actually recycled). Its also worth noting that plastic bottles can be refilled and reused, just not as frequently as glass bottles.
In short, the devil is often in the detail when it comes to packaging. There is no perfect solution that can be applied across the board. Its really a case of looking again at the waste pyramid. In the first instance we should seek to reduce consumption altogether (as noted, I’d be more worried about the environmental impact of the meat rather than the packaging). Then we’d look at reusing where practical. If that’s not an option then recycling and so on.
The trouble is, we’ve got the pyramid upside down. We use (and then discard) way more than we need to. Only when landfills began to overflow did we look at incineration. Then when nobody wanted to live down wind of a an incinerator, we looked at recycling and so on. So it looks to me as if Sainsbury’s are trying to doing the best they can, within the limits of current UK legislation. And we currently have a government who is openly hostile to environmental issues, something that’s likely to only get worse between now and the next election. If you disagree with Sainsbury’s strategy, then its the government you should be whinging too, not the company.
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