Retailers, brand owners and the packaging chain are part of a heavyweight group urging the new coalition government to help businesses lessen the environmental impact of the products they make and sell.
The Designing Out Waste Consortium under the aegis of environment think tank Green Alliance has just published a report, titled ‘A pathway to greener products’.
INCPEN (Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment) has joined the consortium, which includes Asda, Boots UK, GlaxoSmithKline, Royal Mail, Sainsbury's, Unilever, Valpak and Veolia, in calling the government to help all businesses to lighten the environmental burden of products they put on the market.
It marks the first time leading UK and multinational companies have come together to call for a major overhaul in the government’s approach to designing out waste, says Hannah Hislop, Senior Policy Adviser at Green Alliance.
The consortium believes that consumers at all levels of the market want and expect businesses to provide them with better products with lower environmental impacts. As a result, businesses can and should play an important and proactive role in designing out waste. But it argues that commercial and policy drivers must be correctly aligned to incentivise the right products, and the government can play a catalytic role in the development of these drivers at EU and global level.
The report recommends that a progressive government framework for designing out waste be put in place.
This will entail evaluating product impacts. It would mean the government leading the development of a practical, low cost and widely adopted way of evaluating product impacts and identifying where action should be taken. And it should be done in discussion with businesses, and working with the relevant EU and global institutions.
The government should introduce new measures to tackle the generation of commercial and industrial waste. These could include ambitious sectoral targets and requirements for companies to measure and routinely report material input and output.
Central government should drive the development of a broad set of lifecycle based sustainability performance standards for products. Companies and trade associations should be encouraged to set their own baselines for products and to use these to produce improvement strategies to meet these standards.
The group suggests that an expanded Ecodesign Directive could be a way to ensure that the same standards apply across all member states. The UK government should take a proactive stance in EU discussions about how best to do this.
Finally, government should explore the potential for upstream incentives to encourage businesses, both in the UK and abroad, to design out waste and design in recovery.
Jane Bickerstaffe, Director of consortium member INCPEN (Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment), said: “We hope that this work will deliver policies that will help companies continue to improve their environmental performance and will support our vision of a sustainable packaging and product supply chain which will enable goods to be produced, distributed, used and recovered with minimum environmental impact at lowest social and economic cost.”
