Rubbish packaging claims?
The UK’s packaging regulations certainly seem to be starting to bite with even my cat food bragging about a 10% cut in cardboard. I like the way they’re ‘bundling’ the (rather modest) environmental improvement with the benefit of less space taken up in your shopping bag, but bemused by the fact that they feel they have to remind the consumer that it hasn’t changed the “great taste” of the product…
Rather underwhelming is this claim on a Sainsbury’s juice carton that a minor change has cut 65 tonnes by redesigning their ringpulls. Sainsbury’s are a bit coy about how much packaging goes through their stores, but extrapolating figures from their last CR report suggests it is in the region of 182,000 tonnes a year. So the 65 tonnes represents just 0.036% of their total – hardly anything to brag about.
If I were Sainsbury’s I would put this in the context of their wider achievements – something like “It is innovations like this that have helped us cut 8,000 tonnes of packaging per year from our products.” It has to be said that the 8,000 tonnes still only represents 4.4% of the total – making even the catfood look good!
All in all, these green claims are a bit weak, mainly because the underlying achievements are rather modest. They need to do something worth boasting about first or their efforts will simply disappear into the fug of similar claims.
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