Examination of Witnesses (Questions 476-479)
Ms Jane Bickerstaffe, Mr Stephen Carter, Dr Robert Chilton and Dr Forbes McDougall
4 MARCH 2008
Q476 Chairman: Good morning, lady and gentlemen. May I start by welcoming you and thanking you for the written evidence you have provided us with so far. We are looking into this area of waste and in some respects we are as much concerned with designing waste out of the system as with how to deal with resource issues in other respects. Perhaps before we start you could introduce yourselves.
Dr McDougall: Good morning. My name is Forbes McDougall. I am an environmental engineer with Proctor & Gamble. I spent a number of years working in the Netherlands and Asia before joining Proctor & Gamble and have worked in a number of different roles in the company. I have worked on lifecycle assessment of waste management systems and I am currently responsible for the technical aspects of waste management at our manufacturing facilities globally.
Dr Chilton: Good morning. I am Bob Chilton. I am the Vice Chair of the National Consumer Council. For the avoidance of doubt that is the old National Consumer Council. The new one gets its powers in October. Relevant to this inquiry, I am also a board member of the Waste Resources Action Group.
Mr Carter: I am Steph Carter. I am Packaging Sustainability Director for Unilever. I work on a global basis rather than a UK basis because Unilever operates in 150 countries worldwide. My background is packaging technology so I am a packing technologist and previously I have been responsible for packaging, functional design and specification of the packs that Unilever puts in the market place.
Ms Bickerstaffe: I am Jane Bickerstaffe. I am Director of INCPEN, which is the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment. We are a group of companies who operate throughout the supply chain, so we have got raw material suppliers and packaging manufacturers across all the different types of material and users of packaging, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, for example, are both members, and retailers as well in membership. We were set up in 1974 to do research on social and environmental aspects of packaging.
Q477 Chairman: Thank you. I will ask this question and probably you will all want to dive in to answer it. We are aware that large manufacturers like yourselves consider waste reduction during the design, production, packaging and distribution stages of a product's life. You give consideration to that but to what extent do you have data that can enable you to make the appropriate management and technical decisions in that process? To what extent does it have a calculation and to what extent is it guesstimation?
Mr Carter: We are fortunate in terms of the development of technology, particularly from the motor industry and the aerospace industry. In Unilever we use a lot of computer-aided engineering, which is essentially computer programmes which can mimic what is not real. You input what material you are using and we can strength-test various shapes of packaging and components without ever making them. This technology is now surprisingly accurate; it is 95% accurate, so in the design phase we interrogate each new piece of packaging we are planning to make. We assess its strength and if it is too strong we will remove material. If it is too weak we may switch material from one side of the pack to the other or change an angle slightly to strengthen it. At the same time we look at how efficiently that piece of packaging is made or moulded. If we can mould it more efficiently it saves us money because you get more components from the same amount of time on the machine, but also it saves a significant amount of energy. For example, our new deodorant roll-on pack which is being launched at the moment saves six million kilowatt hours of electricity in a year simply because it is 30% faster to manufacture because we have used this technology.
Dr McDougall: If I take a step back from the actual pack or product design and move to the big picture, both ourselves and Unilever use the tool of lifecycle assessment when studying the environmental burdens associated with a product or a packaging, from the sourcing of raw materials through the manufacture, the distribution and the disposal phases. We have very detailed information on our major product streams, and we can understand and identify where the biggest energy impacts or the biggest disposal impacts are, or air emissions or water emissions at each stage of that lifecycle for each process, and that allows us within reason to be able to identify where we have to put the effort into the product. For example, with laundry powders, the biggest single environmental burden is the energy used by the consumer in the home, heating the water and running the washing machine, so we try and develop powders that can operate at lower temperatures so you can save more power per wash.
Ms Bickerstaffe: I would just like to add that I think because packaging has been so much in the environmental spotlight for so many years companies in this supply chain are probably ahead of many others in understanding how to integrate environmental considerations alongside the technical considerations that they put in place.
Q478 Lord Lewis of Newnham: We have had before us people from the aluminium industry and the plastics industry who emphasised, for instance, in the case of aluminium, that the recovery rate for the bulk of processes was very high, but one at which they were most inefficient was where it was involved with waste as a whole in that they think it went into landfill sites. That is where they were losing a lot of their aluminium, partly, of course, because it was so light. Do you actually consider in your design the requirements of the waste disposal site? I am thinking, for instance, of plastics. In many instances you see two types of plastic being mixed together which means that to a large extent you have effectively lost the potential of recycling that particular commodity. Plastic and aluminium were the two instances that were brought forward to us as being very inefficient from the point of view of recovery from the waste line.
Ms Bickerstaffe: I do think you are pointing out that from a manufacturing point of view in the supply chain you have to look at the big picture. The intention is to get goods through the supply chain with the minimum use of resources and there are different ways of doing that. Sometimes you might choose a single material and then look to recycle it at the end to reduce the overall environmental burden. At other times you might sensibly combine different materials, and one of the clever things in the UK is that we have had a fairly broad order of innovation in producing laminates, which are layers of different materials, so you reduce the amount of waste at the beginning; it is real waste reduction, but at the end, you are right, it is not so sensible to try and recycle it. What a manufacturer will do is look at the total picture and if that makes sense then they will go with that. It is interesting that the UK puts less packaging on the market than many other European countries, and we think one of the reasons for that is the use of laminate packaging.
Q479 Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My question picks up on that. I appreciate that you are doing all this engineering and are, for example, making plastic that you use on, say, yoghurt pots or ice cream thinner than it was, but nevertheless at the moment these are on the whole not recyclable and, given that they have a half life of 10,000 years or something like that in a waste tip, you feel rather for future archaeologists.
Ms Bickerstaffe: The things that go into landfill, and we do still landfill a significant amount in this country, you do not want to degrade because those are the ones that give off methane and can cause problems, so the fact that they are inert in the landfill site is a plus. The recyclability, as I say, is just one aspect of it. In a way, in this country we need to be careful that we do not try and run before we can walk. We have good systems in place for recycling our glass, our metals and our paper to some extent. Plastics is comparatively new for recycling and what most countries have done is focus on getting out the rigid plastics, the solid bottles, where you have got 40 or 50 grams of material, and that can be done with an environmental plus. With things like yoghurt pots, toothpaste tubes, frankly, there is as much contamination sometimes with residue in there as there is material and the logistics of getting it back, the environmental burden of cleaning it and reprocessing it, at the moment probably does not make sense. In future it may. At the moment it will either go to landfill where it is inert and will not cause a problem, or in an increasing number of areas it will go to an energy-from-waste plant and so we do get something back from it; we get the energy back.
Dr Chilton: If I may pick up on Lord Lewis's point, one of the key incentives on local authorities in respect of waste is to maximise tonnage. The problem with aluminium is that it is very light but it is very carbon-intense, and so that is why the switch is increasingly to trying to reducing the carbon impact rather than the tonnage impact, although we are still in a transitional phase. Ideally, the more the consumer at the point of disposal can segregate the waste cleanly the less contamination you are getting on mixed waste. But, if you observe a number of local authorities, because of the tonnage objective, they have been going for mixed waste and although the recycling plants do have optical means of separating the two types of plastic it is inefficient to do that.
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