Designing Tomorrow: The Circular Economy's Role in Sustainable Packaging

Transcription:

Sean Riley: With all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Tim Grant: Hi, Sean. Glad to be here.

Sean Riley: So I guess to kick things off maybe we could start with a high level question of what do you mean when you refer to the circular economy?

Tim Grant: The circular economy in its, strict definitions is about designing out waste keeping materials at their highest value and restoring nature.

But that's more like. The high-level spiel of what it does. What it really is in some ways, you could see it particularly from the packaging industry perspective as a bit of a repackaging of the old waste hierarchy and a bunch of earlier things, eco design, environmental conscious design. Mostly it's like being able to take those things and put them into a much more accessible framework for industry and government, hence its success way beyond many of its sort of predecessor methodologies and approaches that were more academic or maybe for high end leading industry, but never really picked up more generally.

I think. One thing that's really important in the circular economy is the word economy, because the economy to me is, what we create as human beings, it's our interactions. And so to have that at the center of really realigning, creating an economy that we want and that we can maintain and create that is useful to us is a really good concept that, at that very high level.

Sean Riley: Very interesting. Okay. Then with that in mind, how does an organization define And prioritize sustainability goals. Yeah,

Tim Grant: but I think it's important to separate out the sorts of goals and, we probably refer to them as indicators that you're going to use to address particular goals between ones which input related.

What are you doing? actively to achieve a better outcome. And so that might be things like training and redesigning products and setting targets themselves is a, is an action of change then there's outcome. Indicators things which describe all you've increased your overall level of recycled content.

You've increased your circularity. You've made what you think of better products. And then at the third level really is what are the impacts having so having indicators and goals around you actually reducing overall impact measured in things like carbon footprints, water footprints, other environmental metrics.

And so I think, it's important to address all three of those. The environmental impacts are often a little slow to change. You can make a lot of changes, a lot of effort and get a very small shift while the sort of lead metrics of, changing your processes, working through your product range to make sure everything has had some view of redesign as aligning to.

to particular principles and goals is something you can really do early on and measure that, you have those systems in place. And then hopefully with a bit of a lag, your impacts will start to come down associated with the product mix.

Sean Riley: Okay. So then taking the circular economy there's often this tradeoff between the different sustainability metrics, whether it's, what are climate change, recycled content plastic free, et cetera, that, the different sustainability metrics.

How can you navigate and balance what might be perceived as conflicting objectives such as reducing material use versus promoting recyclability or circularity?

Tim Grant: I think the first important thing with that is to recognize that there are tradeoffs and tensions, maybe is also another word we might use as a, between things and not to wedge yourself too closely to a particular narrative about, something that you're doing that is great.

And ignoring, some of those tensions and tradeoffs. So first thing is to recognize that it's not easy. And these things exist and need to be addressed and you need to find a way to navigate through them. The second part would be to try to resolve those metrics using ultimately the impacts of where we're really trying to make a difference.

So the impacts are the sort of endpoint of all of this activity, at least from the point of view of the environment and from, most high level sustainability goals, we're trying to reduce impact. So it's not surprising from someone who's a director of a company called Lifecycles that I'd suggest that life cycle assessment plays an important role in In trying to resolve these tensions and maybe not for every pack or everything, but in certain key situations using something like life cycle assessment to say, okay, what in Which circumstances and which places it can be very dependent on the product sector and on waste management systems that are available and things do strategies work better.

And with this is changing all the time. I'm always like, I have a, my rules of thumb of what works in certain situations. And my thumbs keep falling off because I go back to the rule of thumb and I go and check it and. So it's something that is very dynamic, particularly with the changing nature of material production, the energy systems, waste management systems that are going on in different places and locations.

It's not easy to just say, Oh, yeah, we know how that tension things, but still Rules of thumb and learnings are really important to apply from specific cases into more general cases. I think to do some work on, key products through life cycle assessment and then apply that back to those learnings to your broader product range could be really important.

And I think the other aspect of that is if you are using something like life cycle assessment. It's very reductive. We break the system down into little pieces and we add everything up as it is today, usually we're normally bound by, what's happening now, and that doesn't tell us what strategies are going to be maybe not great performers today, but.

In five years time as the economy shifts and systems get better and technology things move along their technology curve may have a lot more potential in the future than maybe better performers today that really are just stuck. They're never going to get any better because they are.

they're already a mature product. So I think we need to be careful to allow some of those trade offs and say not always will we, pick the thing which has the lowest carbon footprint, because we actually believe that this other system if we could get it right. And if we think back to the paperless office, how many years did it take to get the paperless office into place?

It seemed to create more paper for the first 10 years of its promise. And then eventually Paper just disappeared overnight in many situations we'd all forgotten about the paperless office when eventually disappeared. It just happened, but it takes a long time and has, so those benefits can take a while as people organizations and consumers get in the swing of what it is that that's being addressed and brought forth.

So not having to reductionist approach thinking a little bit about how. And we actually do it in life cycle assessment. We do future oriented life cycle assessment, where we literally take our models and project everything five, 10 years into the future to see if it changes the sort of decision we would make.

And of course, that comes with a lot of additional uncertainty and. things, but it really can give you a different view to, your journey in the different product space. And this is really important as well as at the moment with the trends against a single use plastic movements across into paper and renewable products bio based materials.

There's a lot to sorry about the pun, “unpack” in those product systems. And I still have a little bit of unclear what that is going to look like.

Sean Riley: Interesting. Very interesting. Very thoughtful answer. Given this, the way supply chains are such so global in nature now how do we ensure, how do you ensure consistency and reliability and sustainability metrics across diverse geographical regions and diverse suppliers.

It is such a the world is all interconnected now, but has a bunch of different ideas. How do you ensure that the metrics are that are being used are consistent?

Tim Grant: Yeah, this is a real difficult one. And it's surprising packaging has been in this sort of, metrics area and life cycle assessment and things packaging was the starting point.

It was the middle point. It's still a really dominant. activity in the domain. Again, it has the least stamp. Maybe that's badly because maybe it's because of that. It has the least standardization of any of the sectors from what I can tell in terms of method of agreed methodology and approaches to for products.

We, if we're in the building sector, there's a very rigid set of standards that govern how building life cycle assessment is undertaken and hasn’t been done at the international level, but it's been done by the Europeans and essentially adopted pretty much through most other jurisdictions. In the biomass and bio based material space is a lot of supply chain certification and agreed approaches there in the packaging domain We don't have we've had a few attempts the global packaging protocol had an indicator set, but it was just the same indicator set, just a very, maybe too long.

You really want something that maybe refines down and gives maybe some different tiers of assessment. Because if you go to too heavy with your alignment and you say, okay, here's what we've all got to do these 20 different things, no one will follow up. Because the one thing about the packaging process is relative to some other products, they're relative, they're short lived in they're relatively short lived in the design life.

There are many of them and they're all quite small as opposed to buildings, which there are, there appear to be many of them, but they're really big. And there's a so I think it’s dealing with the sheer number of volume of packaging decisions that need to be made and they're made in pretty short design time, timeframes.

So having an approach that will work within that that timeframe. We have a software tool PIQET, which is used globally by many brand owners. And our focus in that tool is for people to be able to information into their decision making in a in a really quick, small micro decisions up to maybe larger strategic decisions, but more about the small, what if I make this choice versus that choice?

Now, we don't have a set of recommended indicators. So we look around the world at what's happening. There's the European product environmental footprint. has a set of indicators and things which are applied in the packaging, but it's pretty heavy pretty onerous as many things that will come out of a European union can be.

And so I think even in their context, I think it's struggling to get traction or acceptance. So I’m not sure rolling that out everywhere else There's then something called environmental product declarations, which are quite useful. These are like standard report cards and so something you could pass between from business to business so that everyone's reporting on the exact same way they have sitting behind them.

They have these rules of how we will assess this thing. So if you're doing a refillable cup, there'll be a rule about how many refills or how you should count them. Or if it's a, yeah. So you set really practical rules for increasing consistency and you also set what indicators should be used. They.

So they hold a lot of promise, but again, they're also quite onerous at the moment. They take a year more really to produce one from start to finish. And so they're not they're not quite there yet, but I have a feeling that what's happening in that domain is that they're getting more and more popular and that.

Maybe at some form of streamlined version of those where we take the rules from them, but maybe we have to tone down the review process and number of things that need to be assessed in them to make something that is usable and practical. But yeah, at the moment I don't really see, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone in the industry or in the global industry any significant attempts to try and get this thing into some form of, workable shape.

I don't know, big, a couple of big players will set certain requirements and guidelines for their suppliers. And we're getting a lot of suppliers connecting, contacting us and asking, we've been asked by someone or other to provide data on this ingredient or this packaging material. And here's the big, long list of things that we've got to do to meet that.

Hopefully that pressure will build and, we'll be able to come up with something, a common approach so that producers are not having to reinvent data in six different formats for different approaches, which I don't think is not very practical.

Sean Riley: So it's almost like the multinational companies have to set the guidelines that everybody will come on board with because the governments are a little slow to come together on it.

Tim Grant: Yeah, look, governments are never well suited, I think, to that sort of thing. I think within the Environmental Product Declaration space, there is a mechanism where any one industry but can step forward and produce product, these product category rules and say, okay, we don't need/want to get some consistency and they will then publish that.

And then everyone, other producers have the ability to come in and join, what's essentially an international networking group to set those rules and that process takes, a bit over a year to set the rules. But once done they can be useful. But as I say, they're probably still not quite light enough.

And it's hard to, when you get a group of people in a room, to get people to agree on streamlined approaches can be difficult. Yeah, understood.

Sean Riley: Okay. How about the stakeholders, whether they're internal or external? How do you involve them in the process of selecting and evaluating sustainability metrics?

And. With that, what role is customer preferences and demands playing in that decision making process?

Tim Grant: Yeah. I think the it's tricky cause I, I think the customers the customer is always right. And people, companies are often wanting to be customer led in their thinking about development of their product.

It's really the dumbest thing to do when it comes to sustainability because people react to what they see and what's in front of them and what ends up in front of them is waste packaging. So the focus on, solving single use packaging and packaging waste in general and Is way more significant to the customer than is how packages are produced upstream in the supply chain because they don't see how a, how a petrochemical refinery or a paper mill or any log that works.

What they see is waste on their table. And of course, that becomes their focus. That's not the most sensible way. Place to start your focus. If you're looking at the life cycle of products, when the majority of the impacts are actually happening upstream within that production. I think what's important is that when companies are working with both their internal cost stakeholders their employees are often a real driver for improvement within a company.

And their customers, and their suppliers is that they bring. If they're going to do something that is a little bit innovative and maybe not just placating, whatever this month's key issue is they're going to have to communicate that really well. I think I have to communicate that they accept that the topic is complex, that they are undertaking rigorous analysis behind the scenes of the options, that they have, and then communicating why they're moving down particular directions, why they have moved into a rapidly renewable biobased material or why they're not moving into that and why they're still using plastic liners within something and the impacts of that on product quality and things.

So I think they need to bring honest, transparent sort of way, bring along their customers. Rather than just saying we have to all go into paper bags and underpants because that's what our customers are asking for. So I really think we need to apply the science and try and bring people along with us rather than just, look for the short term solution, which will be short term and, the customers will have a different experience. Demand next year that they want attached to the product.

Sean Riley: That's fantastic. And this was fantastic. I can't thank you enough, Tim, for taking time out of your day to come on here with us and walk us through, the circular economy and the different aspects of this.

So thanks again for coming on.

Tim Grant: No problem. Thanks, Sean. Have a great day.