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Solving the climate crisis: here’s how retailers can swap one billion pieces of plastic for sustainable shelf alternatives this year

By David MacDonald, owner and CEO of Cullen Eco-Friendly Packaging, EY Entrepreneur of the Year Transformational Leader and Wired Trailblazer of the Year 2022.

Greener packaging is something that governments are increasingly promoting and the vast majority of consumers say they support. In a 2022 study by First Insight, eight out of ten consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) said they preferred environmentally friendly packaging materials.

With the climate crisis taking a turn for the worse, it’s no wonder that shoppers and policy makers are voicing concerns about plastic packaging waste. It’s a major contributor to climate problems. So food and household goods companies, as well as retailers, need to respond to this issue with more urgency. Thankfully, some are starting to adopt bold and innovative changes to reduce packaging waste.

M&S, for instance, is planning for 100% of its food packaging to be easily recyclable by 2025. Used to plastic’s efficacy and supply ecosystem, however, many companies are unsure whether plastic can indeed be replaced at the scale and cost they need in order to match their sustainability goals.

Thankfully, a range of viable replacements already exist. Retailers and producers are starting to realise this, because they’re beginning to look for plastic alternatives in earnest. They’ll find that not only can they replace hundreds of millions of plastic packages now, but they’ll be able to get billions more in the coming months and years. That’s great news for their sustainability plans, as well as the health of the planet. So how should retailers put their plastic packaging replacement plans into action? Here are 4 opportunities to seize.

1. Paper replaces plastic

An April 2023 a poll by the Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) found that the majority of consumers wanted paper packaging instead of plastic. Moulded fibre is a paper based material, and it’s being used in more varied ways than ever. Entirely natural and totally recylable and compostable, innovation, design and engineering has meant that it can now be sculpted into highly nuanced shapes similar to plastic packaging. Here’s the rub: many big retailers have never really had to look for plastic alternatives for many packaging needs, so are unaware of these important advances with moulded fibre, and the sustainability wins that the material offers.

Indeed, many brands, retailers and sectors remain unaware that so much plastic packaging can be almost entirely replaced now. They don’t need to wait for amazing new inventions when so much single-use plastic can be switched out immediately.

So therefore it’s mission-critical that we urgently educate retailers, as well as their supply chain, that moulded fibre can in fact already replace plastic in many varied ways. Doing so will surely help speed up the transition from toxic packages to eco-friendly ones.

2. Scale is now possible

The next opportunity is scale. Some innovative sustainable packaging materials are extremely interesting until you look at the quantities they can be made in. There are much touted ‘miracle’ materials but sadly they can only be made in small quantities, around 60,000 units per year.

That’s a drop in the plastic-polluted ocean, as we need hundreds of millions, indeed billions of alternatives. Small production scale also makes the products expensive, so mass manufacturing is required to supply sustainable packaging products at a cost that works for all sectors.

That can be difficult to do. There’s an enormous variety of plastic designs firstly, and secondly a huge amount of material is readily required. At Cullen Eco-Friendly Packaging, we tackle this by having our own in-house design and engineering team, we building our own machines and tooling, allowing us to create moulded fibre equivalents of each plastic design that needs to be replaced. Our simple five step plastic transition process means we can be ready to mass manufacture any new moulded fibre design within one month.

We tackle the problem of raw material availability by making our own moulded fibre, from our own waste. We use the paper offcuts from our global corrugate business to create the material. So it’s not just a sustainable circular manufacturing process, but also one that gives us raw material in vast quantities.

To give you an idea of the scale needed for sustainable packaging manufacturing, more than 1.2 billion items of ours have been used over the past two years alone, across 34 countries globally. They’re in 98% of NHS hospitals, all major supermarkets, most high street coffee shop chains and fast food chains. It’s also used instead of plastic to protect an array of items in transit like drinks, paint, electrical and industrial goods and much more.

There’s no question that the drive to swap plastic for sustainable alternatives will see us manufacture far more in the future, so we have built additional factory space and machines, while expanding our innovation infrastructure and team to address the increased demand.

3. Costs are comparable when produced at scale

Some retailers have said that replacing plastic with sustainable packaging isn’t about profit, it’s about doing the right thing. I believe you can do both. Moulded fibre packaging is within an acceptable cost range, comparable when produced at scale. Even more interestingly, there’s an opportunity for the head of sustainability to easily get approval from the head of procurement and CFO.

The UK’s new EPR tax (and similar initiatives around the world) will mean that you’re going to be liable for taxation on plastic and hard-to-recycle products. Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain all have plans to implement their own version, as well as countries as far apart as Canada and Thailand. Moulded fibre packaging, on the other hand, won’t be taxable. This means that it makes even more financial sense, which is a relief for retailers and their shoppers as they shouldn’t have to bear huge price rises.

4. Clever new innovations are in mass production

We have barely scratched the surface of possibilities with moulded fibre. In our case, a new invention we’re really proud of is our patented Fibre Bottle. This innovation is a replacement for single use plastic bottles and pouches containing dry goods as varied as horticultural products, vitamins, spices, pet foods and household cleaning products.

The best part? Like all moulded fibre, it can be made in mass volumes. Imagine stripping almost 170 million pieces of virgin and single-use plastic bottles or pouches from shelves per year? That’s possible starting now.

The climate crisis is scary, but it’s also an incredible opportunity to put things as right as we possibly can. For my part, my team and I are pulling out all the stops to offer shoppers, retailers and manufacturers sustainable replacements for plastic packaging. By combining that with other environmental initiatives, we can start to turn the tide back in our favour.