I like a good croissant – don’t you? Thursday mornings are now ASDA delivery mornings chez-nous, comme d’habitude. A wide variety of deliverymen (and yes, they have all been hommes to date) arrive in our early morning slot and deliver some of what we ordered. This is a covid-legacy pour nous. There is a minimum order price each week and un jour we will forget to cancel the six bouteilles de vin rouge de Rioja that maintain our slot until we have time to give it more thought on a mercredi soir.
De temps en temps we order four croissants for our petit déjeuner, as a treat – we know how to live a little. If you have got into this grocery delivery allouette, as we have, then you’ll realise that if an item is unavailable, the delivery usually has the supermarket’s guess as to a suitable alternative. ASDA didn’t have four croissants to give us, c’est la vie, but they did have a pack of six, so we took them.
One of my reasons for getting groceries delivered is that I guess it must be greener for a few delivery vans to trundle around the rues et boulevards de ma ville than for us all to drive to the shop individually. I’d guess that’s vrai wouldn’t you?
On examination, j’ai vu that our croissants had been baked in France, that was quite surprising, and that they were individually wrapped en plastique, which they most certainly were…
… and that the wrapping, which was quite a lot, was non-recyclable…
I note with interest the instruction NOT to recycle rather than an apology that one cannot recycle the wrapping. It’s a shame, but clearly the wrapping allows the date on the wrapping to be 14 August, still two weeks away, and those croissants didn’t reach 1 août let alone 14 August. The croissants were fine but quite a long way from the days of doing fieldwork in France where a stroll to the local boulangerie for freshly-baked baguettes and croissants was part of the experience, along with the Bee-eaters and driving on the wrong side of the road.
But that’s just a petit souvenir des temps passés and we should be concerned about not just the quality of the food that arrives at our door but also the sustainability of the packaging. I wonder what would happen if I returned all items ordered that were not wrapped in recyclable wrappings? Or maybe if I returned the unrecyclable wrappings and boxes and cartons the following week? Je vais devoir y réfléchir.
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quite impressive Franglais. Good point about the wrappings too. And I believe in France they don’t smash up all their wine bottles and waste huge amounts of energy melting and re-forming them – they just wash and refill. Les supermarche could arrange that too.
I am not sure that its true that most wine bottles in france are washed and re-filled. Wines from different apellations come in different shaped and coloured bottles and I guess it would be a very complex business getting the right bottles back to the right bottlers. Certainly a quick google of french bottle suppliers indicates that the manufacturers make much of the fact that glass is recovered, re-melted and formed into new bottles. Googling re-use of bottles in France mostly yields pages about how you can turn them into attractive vases and candle holders…
Beer and pop bottles have been widely returnable and refillable here, in the past, and still are in in some countries. The benefits of doing so are not absolutely clear cut though. Returnable bottles are much more heavily built than single use bottles meaning that a lorry load of a given volume of beer will be substantially heavier and will use more energy in transport. Cleaning operations will consume substantial amounts of water and chemicals and generate effluent for disposal. Additionally, any benefit of the re-usability depends on a sufficiently high proportion actually being returned. This is probably high from bars and restaurants but less reliable from off-sales.
I don’t profess to know where the balance lies but these things are often less straightforward than they appear at fist glance.
When I visited Hungary in the early nineties it was common to buy beer where the same brand came in different coloured bottles. The reason for this was that the various brewers used the standard size and shaped bottle for their beer so they could reuse not only their own but each others bottles which was a very sensible idea – only in colour of new bottles did the the breweries diverge so you could end up the same brew in a different colour later down the line. This excellent example of reuse did help compensate, spiritually at least, for the actual beer which was bloody awful. I dread to think what’s happened to that wonderful system now.
I think that a system for reusables would have to be vey inefficient to be worse environmentally than recycling. Cullet, the broken glass used for recycling will be even heavier than reusable bottles and probably have to be transported further to a furnace. The furnace will of course use a lot of energy although less than making glass from the raw materials. The new bottles will probably have to be cleaned too. You hit the nail on the head Jonathon when you mentioned return rate, if extra expense and material has went into a reusable item then it’s a bloody tragedy if it gets chucked after one use. It’s a risky business going for reuse.
This is why I think recycling is not an impediment to reduce and reuse as some have stated, it’s a platform for getting people to switch from throwing everything in the bin. Once you’ve got people habitually recycling then there’s more chance phasing in reusable items will have a high rate of return. In fact if recycling schemes can begin incorporating the collection of reusable items in their operations both their environmental performance and economic viability will go shooting up. If you have a big, expensive chipping machine you can feed a broken one trip pallet through it for a wee pile of woodchips to make chipboard you’ll get a few pennies for it. Pick up a heavier duty, reusable pallet in good nick you can get three, four or five quid for it – just stack them in the corner until the pallet bloke can pick up a batch. There are so many other products that should be possible to do this with if good return rates are guaranteed.
This is just one part of the wonderful potential recycling has in everything from creating social inclusion in areas ridden with apathy and vandalism, to raising funds for charity, to being a platform for wildlife conservation – this is what your recycling protects – want to learn more? Sadly they haven’t even managed to get a significant part of the UK public to use litter bins yet. That has to change, saving wildlife will just be impossible if we don’t rein in our consumption of natural resources.
In the town in Germany where part of my wife’s family live, you take your empty bottles to a hole in the wall and feed them in. It counts and identifies what you ‘posted’ and returns the money (I don’t recall if cash or a voucher) for any of the bottles that had a deposit on them. The system appears to work well, contributing to a high recovery rate. It would be interesting to know whether here in the UK all we need is the schemes to be set up and infrastructure provided or whether we additionally require a big attitude change within the population overall. As you point out in your post, Les, we seem to be a nation of litterers so we perhaps we would need to do a a fair bit of attitude changing for such a scheme to work. I agree that getting people to care about these things is essential if we are to turn around the decline in wildlife both because sustainable use of resources is necessary in order to relieve pressure on natural habitats and because people who don’t really care about shredded plastic bags flapping in the trees are unlikely to care much either about the fate of hen harriers and hedgehogs and probably not at all for invertebrates and plants.
A couple of years back the Scottish Government made much ado about proposed plans to bring in a similar deposit scheme to the one you describe. Involving the individual directly it was of course a high profile initiative – which made me wonder if that was the real reason for it being proposed. Quite a fanfare at the time and a few years down the road – zilch. Even if this had become reality at some stage it didn’t touch the far less conspicuous, but far greater amount of ‘waste’ material pouring out from the retail/administration/manufacturing sectors which the public don’t deal with correctly. It would at least have been covered by papers Scotgov produced on the circular economy, moving away from extraction, processing, use, then disposal – towards recovery and reuse avoiding much extraction of natural resources and disposal of ‘waste’ at either end as we move to them going round and round in a circle. Again after the initial fanfare nothing happens.
However, in the past few years umpteen proposals have come up to build waste to energy incinerators which will do away with much of this reduce, reuse, recycle ‘malarkey’ – unfortunately it will also do away with the vast majority of their environmental, ecological and economic benefits too. After the massive investment needed to build incinerators there is an obligation to ‘feed’ them with an equally massive amount of rubbish day in day out for decades, at least twenty to twenty five years, a complete human generation. If you reduce the waste you produce by say upping recycling rates then the incinerator is in trouble….so recycling rates won’t be increased. If all the proposed incinerators in Scotland get the go ahead then two out of five point five million tons of ‘waste’ produced in Scotland each year will go into an incinerator, and it will be good stuff like plastics, paper, cardboard, wood rather than old bricks or tea bags. An enormous loss for the environment and wildlife. As up here especially brand Climate Change is king then absolutely nobody is campaigning against this apart perhaps from local groups worried about pollution. There isn’t even any basic awareness raising.
I’m hoping to create a ‘Don’t Incinerate, Educate!’ petition for Scotgov soon, but after another waste related petition nine years ago I’m not confident it’ll achieve anything. It actually got me invited to the parliament to speak to the petitions committee of MSPs and later on I was told my petition was superfluous as the points it raised were already part of its plans – standardised best practice for the in house teaching and practice of reduce, reuse, recycle in our schools. Nine years later and it still hasn’t happened, another lie.
When the world manages to waste about 40% of its food, when ancient forest is felled, then replaced with plantations, to make virgin fibre toilet paper and we have a thousand and one other obscenities then we can forget saving what’s left of our wilderness and wildlife. With proper reduce, reuse, recycle in place we’d not only be able to ecologically restore an awful lot more land there’d be a hell of a lot less destruction of pristine habitat in the first place. While there’s a desperate push to get natural tree cover back in Scotland there’s massive illegal felling of old growth forest in the Carpathians. It’s all a mess and that needs changing.
The long(er) life croissants contain palm oil. Which leaves me thinking – they may be baked in France, but would the French eat them?
tuwhit – are they? Isn’t life very complicated?
Our local baker makes a very passable croissant, made in Britain from British wheat flour. Support local business, reduce food miles, and feel smug.
There’s nowt wrong with toast.
“tuwhit – are they?”
Baked in France?
The scope for reducing waste, and thereby make recycling a lot easier because a lot less is needed, is phenomenal. Here’s just one example. Tesco used to, and Morrisons still does, an ultra cheap own brand toothpaste that completely foregoes having the little individual cardboard box the vast majority of toothpastes come with. Clearly Morrisons ultra cheap toothpaste manages to meet the practical and legal requirements (accessible consumer information – ingredients, use before date etc) it has without having the little cardboard box. Not only would that save a bit of cardboard from having to be made then reprocessed or landfilled/incinerated, it would mean far more loose toothpaste tubes would fit in boxes reducing the amount of packaging – boxes, pallets, shrink wrap – needed to transport the toothpaste to retail centres. Far bigger savings there I would imagine.
There shouldn’t be any valid reason why all toothpaste can’t dispense with the cardboard box if Morrisons can do so. How much waste and expense could be cut if they did? The profit margins on own brand items are pretty tight so they serve as an excellent guide of how minimalist packaging could really be….. really minimalist when it’s believed to cut into profit rather than add to sales. My goodness manufacturers suddenly become very ‘green’ when that’s the case. Imagine if all toothpaste makers jointly decided to forego cardboard with their tubes, announced it as a waste saving measure and told the public a part of the money saved would go to good causes?
How much packaging is used with the croissants home delivered by other supermarkets, does any plastic wrap at least carry an apology for being non recyclable, what’s the best environmental packaging option used and how do we make that the standard? Apply this very simple process of comparison between brands of a specific product to every product and the waste reduction (and money raised for charity from just a part of the financial savings?) could be enormous. What if groups of school children took this on as a project, wouldn’t manufacturers and retailers be far less likely to ignore their observations and suggestions? Forty five months later and I’m still waiting for Tesco to tell me why some of their carrots are sold in solid plastic cartons.
Loose toothpaste tubes would be a nightmare to stack onto a market shelf. Slippy-slidey shapes that defy stacking, although they might tesselate in theory. They’d be all over the floor (and mixed up).
If the cardboard packaging didn’t include plastics (which it often does – a ‘film’ to enable prominent product identity (colours, shiny logos, etc.)
I’m of the opinion that the people who make the choices on package design (and other stuff) don’t give a flying fcuk. They don’t have a problem with the problem(s) they create. Many people don’t see the problems. If a few people have a problem then its up to them to solve it. But legislating against it is a no-no.
So how does Morrisons manage to stack loose toothpaste tubes on its shelves then? Elementary my dear Tuwit……the box they are delivered to the store in is opened up and put on the shelf directly. Yes a lot of designers couldn’t care less about packaging design and in fact many think over packaging to make it look as if people are buying more than they really are (an acquaintance of an acquaintance confirmed this is why publishers produce books with big margins) is part and parcel (wee pun) of their job. Packaging is as bad as ever so there’s no point doing what’s been done before to reduce it – it doesn’t work.
This is why I love the idea of a project where school kids compare products to see how little packaging can be used and if it can incorporate recycled materials and be designed for easier recycling or even reuse. They could flag this up to the public while politely approaching manufacturers to suggest changes – it wouldn’t look good if the latter ignored them would it? Over packaging inevitably raises costs it’s just that companies think increased sales will be more significant. That will change if people are better informed about what constitutes wasteful packaging, and that could be complimented by a scheme where companies can emphasise moving to less packaging by giving part of the financial savings made to a good cause. That could be another layer to the school kids project, helping the environment and charities.
“So how does Morrisons manage to stack loose toothpaste tubes on its shelves then? Elementary my dear Tuwit……the box they are delivered to the store in is opened up and put on the shelf directly.”
Therefore the toothpaste tubes ain’t loose.
Elementary, innit?
The toothpaste tubes probably have less recyclable waste than the shelf display packaging. Cardboard (unless the display cardboard has a coating of plastic).
The cardboard boxes that go on the shelves are the same ones the tubes sit in when being distributed to supermarkets. They would still be used if the tubes came in the standard form in their own individual cardboard boxes. However, with the latter you’d need more boxes to transport the toothpaste in – then more pallets, shrink wrap and space on lorries than to move the equivalent number without their little cardboard overcoats. With the exception of the fundamental toothpaste tube itself ALL packaging use is reduced if you get shot of what is the superfluous cardboard around each tube. This extends to lorries too, the more freight you can fit in them the fewer trips needed with their gas guzzling and air polluting ways. There are countless other ways we could so simply reduce packaging waste.
I would be surprised if the huge Waitrose off the A45 at Rushden didn’t have an in-store bakery where freshly thawed and baked buttery puff-pastry things could be bought daily without non-recyclable wrappings or transport from Europe. They might even be warm when you get them home.