Why Asos, Innocent and Juice see plastic as the sustainable option

The neg­a­tive nar­ra­tive sur­round­ing plas­tic is a famil­iar one. The amount enter­ing our oceans each year is pre­dict­ed to triple to 29 mil­lion tonnes by 2040, with pack­ag­ing the main cul­prit. Yet big brands includ­ing Asos and Inno­cent have stood by it as their mate­r­i­al of choice, which rais­es the ques­tion: is it time to recon­sid­er pop­u­lar per­cep­tions of plas­tic as the vil­lain of the piece? 

Asos has spread the mes­sage on social media that pro­duc­ing its plas­tic mail­er bags – made of 90% recy­cled plas­tic – con­sumes rough­ly a quar­ter of the ener­gy it takes to make the bags out of paper, and that switch­ing to card­board would increase its car­bon emis­sions by half. Mean­while, Inno­cent has pro­duced detailed answers to FAQs about its pack­ag­ing, con­clud­ing that, “at the moment, plas­tic is the most sus­tain­able option for our bot­tles. It has a low­er car­bon foot­print than glass and is much eas­i­er to recy­cle than car­tons.”

The prob­lem is not with plas­tic itself; it’s with the lack of wide­spread recy­cling sys­tems, claims Inno­cent, which argues that the cre­ation of a cir­cu­lar econ­o­my for pack­ag­ing is the solu­tion.

“Plas­tic has a num­ber of qual­i­ties. It’s light­weight, durable and, most cru­cial­ly, recy­clable. As well as using recy­cled con­tent in our bot­tles, we’re also advo­cat­ing for high­er recy­cling rates,” says Emi­lie Stephen­son, who leads Innocent’s UK ‘Force for Good’ ini­tia­tive.

She con­tin­ues: “We’ve advo­cat­ed across Europe by respond­ing to gov­ern­ment con­sul­ta­tions and cam­paign­ing to intro­duce, or be allowed to join, deposit-return sys­tems. We are active­ly sup­port­ing indus­try ini­tia­tives to increase recy­cling rates, use more recy­cled con­tent, adopt reuse mod­els and reduce plas­tic pack­ag­ing vol­umes world­wide.” 

Rethinking plastic as an existing resource

Plas­tic should be used “as an alter­na­tive mate­r­i­al to almost any­thing”, declares Joly­on Ben­nett, founder and CEO of Juice, a provider of mobile phone acces­sories that uses recy­cled and recy­clable plas­tic in its pack­ag­ing.

“There are over 300 bil­lion tonnes of plas­tic on Earth and it’s going to be around for up to 3,000 years, so let’s use sci­ence to find ways to reuse that moun­tain of plas­tic,” he says. “The neg­a­tive per­cep­tion of plas­tic is per­pe­trat­ed by a glob­al mass media that’s telling us not to make plas­tic – and I do get that. It’s the dura­bil­i­ty and longevi­ty of the mate­r­i­al that every­one is bemoan­ing, but actu­al­ly it’s an incred­i­ble mate­r­i­al.”

Ben­nett adds: “The cam­paign should be about not mak­ing more plas­tic and instead reusing the plas­tic we have. That would change per­cep­tions. If every­one used recy­cled plas­tic and recy­cled that, pro­duc­tion would drop by between 70% and 90% glob­al­ly.” 

Zoe Brimelow, brand direc­tor at pack­ag­ing man­u­fac­tur­er Duo UK, agrees. Plas­tic, she says, has been sub­ject to “years of per­se­cu­tion, so it will take a great deal of edu­ca­tion and trans­paren­cy to change this”.

Echo­ing Stephenson’s call for a cam­paign to increase the use of recy­cled plas­tic mate­r­i­al and encour­age more recy­cling, Brimelow cites the ‘Pod­back’ scheme as a case in point. Launched by Duo UK in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts UK, it pro­vides cus­tomers with mail­ing bags so that they can eas­i­ly return used plas­tic and alu­mini­um cof­fee pods for recy­cling.

While using recy­cled plas­tic reduces depen­dence on finite vir­gin resources, there’s also val­ue in sus­tain­able mate­ri­als such as GreenPE, a ther­mo­plas­tic resin made from sug­ar cane, she says. “It’s car­bon-neg­a­tive, ful­ly recy­clable and can be blend­ed with recy­cled plas­tic to make a hybrid solu­tion. This is just one exam­ple of the options beyond using recy­cled plas­tics.” 

Sug­ar-cane plas­tic is what Incog­ni­to, a provider of insect repel­lent, uses in its pack­ag­ing, believ­ing it to be more sus­tain­able than recy­cled con­tent. The company’s founder and CEO, Howard Carter says: “It’s a begin­ning-from-plant mate­r­i­al, which is one of the eas­i­est to recy­cle. Not all plas­tics are so eas­i­ly recy­clable.”

The problem with recycled plastic

This flaw is why many firms have decid­ed to turn their backs on plas­tic. For instance, Phar­ma­Care Europe recent­ly chose com­postable pack­ag­ing for its new sup­ple­ments brand, Veg­an Life, over recy­cled plas­tic.

The company’s brand man­ag­er, Ali­cia Sharif, says: “Recy­cled plas­tic won’t nat­u­ral­ly decom­pose like com­postable pack­ag­ing. This means that, if our pack­ag­ing were to be lit­tered, it wouldn’t have the same neg­a­tive impact.”

She adds that its out­er lay­er is made from reclaimed agri­cul­tur­al waste, which is the stub­ble that in most parts of the world would typ­i­cal­ly be burned after har­vest. This residue can con­sti­tute 80% of a cere­al crop.

Deodor­ant com­pa­ny Wild Cos­met­ics also wants to min­imise its reliance on plas­tic. Wild’s refill­able deodor­ant case is made large­ly of alu­mini­um, while the refills them­selves are pack­aged in com­postable and recy­clable bam­boo pulp.

“Our vision is to help remove sin­gle-use plas­tic from dai­ly per­son­al care rou­tines,” says the firm’s co-founder and CEO, Fred­dy Ward. “While a typ­i­cal plas­tic deodor­ant pack has a lifes­pan of more than 400 years, a Wild refill will com­post ful­ly with­in six months and biode­grade with­in a year.”

Yet there is a cru­cial ele­ment in the mech­a­nism of Wild’s deodor­ant case: recy­cled plas­tic – and Ward acknowl­edges the ben­e­fits of its qual­i­ty, dura­bil­i­ty and mould­abil­i­ty. He and fel­low co-founder Char­lie Bowes-Lyon have inves­ti­gat­ed sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing options such as PLA, a poly­ester that’s biodegrad­able and pro­duces few­er emis­sions in pro­duc­tion than tra­di­tion­al plas­tic. 

But there’s more to it than that, as he explains: “Even though the likes of PLA claim to be com­postable, in real­i­ty this process will still take more than 50 years, and only then under cer­tain con­di­tions. So using recy­cled plas­tic helped us to build a durable prod­uct, while min­imis­ing the need to bring more plas­tic on to our Earth.”

Ward remains open-mind­ed about con­sid­er­ing options beyond the mate­ri­als that Wild cur­rent­ly uses to enhance his company’s sus­tain­able cre­den­tials. But, he says, they must be able to work for the life­time of the case and per­form as well as the exist­ing com­po­nents. Those, per­haps, are the points that may yet improve plastic’s rep­u­ta­tion.