This video is a collaboration with CITEO.
I don't get it! I do not understand why cucumbers get wrapped in plastic.
I, as a good conscientious citizen wanting to reduce my waste, come ready with my little
nets, so as not to use plastic bags to wrap my vegetables.
And bam, this cucumber imposes its plastic upon you.
And it's all the more difficult to understand because the same store can also sell
another type of cucumber that isn't wrapped in plastic.
And everyone is aware of the ecological impact of plastic.
Governments, producers, distributors, consumers... absolutely everyone.
So why? Seriously, why does this aberration still exist?
Please note that this video will be paired with a livestream tomorrow to talk about
packaging design and recycling, specifically in France.
So even if cucumbers don't pique your interest (weird but alright), the livestream
will be fascinating, you will learn a lot of behind the scenes info on how packaging
is conceptualized to create the least possible environmental impact, and on
what happens once you have put something in your recycling bin.
The information is in the description.
Meet Corentin.
Corentin is modest and does not want to reveal everything about his cucumber identity at first glance
without a conversation first, which is why he wears this beautiful natural packaging...
his own skin! The best packaging there is.
The problem is, Corentin doesn't apply any moisturizer and he dries up very quickly.
In a few days, Corentin: young and dashing, turns into Corentin: old and shriveled up.
The circle of life.
Except he has one way to cheat! There is a kind of anti-aging cream for cucumbers:
a plastic film, which preserves it a lot longer from dehydration, yellowing,
deformations and exposure to the cold up to 24 days.
Corentin is a very perishable product...
We don't need to look any further.
We already have our answer.
That's why Corentin gets wrapped in plastic:
to lengthen the time between harvest and consumption.
Besides, cucumbers wrapped in plastic like this one are usually found
in large supermarkets, where it can really take several days
before they're sold... you probably wouldn't see this at a small farmer's market, in a short
sale cycle, because they sell their products almost as soon as they harvest them.
So if a store sells wrapped cucumbers next to unwrapped cucumbers,
it is probably that one is more likely to be thrown away before
its sale than the other.
The topic of packaging, as you know, has fascinated me for a long time.
I have already told you about corrugated cardboard, easy openings and bags of chips.
And what I especially like about these subjects is the engineering of it, how that
works, how it is designed and above all, one of the biggest issues of our time:
how to find the right packaging.
And for that, I spoke with Valentin who works at Citéo.
It is the company that takes care of organizing, sorting and recycling packaging and papers
in France, and they also help companies to eco-design their packaging
(by the way, in the second half of the video we will talk a little more about
how packaging can be eco-designed).
We often make a generalization in saying that the best packaging is the one
that is not there.
It turns out that is not true, at least it is not always true.
So to bring a bit of nuance, I'll say that packaging has a function. First and foremost
it is made to protect the product it contains.
Without packaging, there is a risk of increasing food waste and from an environmental point of view,
there is nothing worse than increasing food waste.
We have this U-shaped curve, where you see that not enough packaging creates more food waste,
and too much packaging, we use up more resources, too many resources
compared to what it could take.
So our role is to find the packaging that's just right.
At the lowest possible point.
When he doesn't wear his plastic outfit, he is very likely to be thrown away (either
at your house or somewhere before, at the distributor for example), and the ecological impact of
food waste and your average packaging waste are not on an equal footing.
When looking at a particular indicator like CO2 emissions, the packaging
represents on average 5% of the environmental impact of a packaged product.
So that does mean that 95% is caused by the product that's inside.
It's extremely important to keep that in mind.
Obviously that's an average.
95%...
That's huge.
If we only looked at this kind of data, which only considers the production
of CO2 into the atmosphere, we would reach the conclusion that any packaging is
a good thing because it protects the product, which can be kept for longer... but we would be
forgetting a whole other part of the problem.
We see a lot of videos, photos, articles that demonstrate the ecological
disaster caused by plastic in the oceans, and it is true.
So what is the solution that best preserves the environment? Should we wrap up
Corentin and affect our biodiversity, or leave him bare and risk food waste?
A rock or a hard place?
Side note.
Is this choice as binary as that? Probably not.
We could also totally rethink our industries, supply systems, that kind of thing.
But that won't be done in a snap, so we have to see how we can improve
what's already in place.
What is being done today, within this way of working, means that there are fewer options.
I'll circle back to it in a bit.
End of the side note.
In fact, there is not one good answer but rather lots of not-great answers because
these are all compromises, and they always entail downsides.
And these compromises don't just happen between 2 criteria, that would be much too simple.
Under the terms 'ecological impact' or 'environmental impact', there are
at least 16 subsections.
That is to say that we don't work with 'an environmental impact' of products or packaging.
There are many environmental impacts.
Among environmental impacts, we mentioned emissions of CO2, obviously I think that's the one
that we talk about the most because of its extremely strong impact on global warming.
There's also the most talked about one when we talk about packaging: plastic.
Unregulated landfills are a problem, waste that ends up in the wild poses a threat to biodiversity,
that has a big impact on biodiversity.
And then we have other indicators like resource depletion, for example.
Here we look at the use of the necessary resources to produce packaging.
Ther's also water usage.
And we have a whole bunch of indicators like that.
If we look at what is commonly called LCA, or life cycle analysis, that is to say
that we are looking at the environmental impact of a product or packaging throughout its
life cycle, from the production of materials up until the end of its use, often
we use 16 different indicators.
And still, there is a lack in there, in particular when it comes to biodiversity which is still
a little underevaluated in this LCA.
So we can see that there are a lot of indicators.
And the tricky part is that we might improve on one indicator, but downgrade another
as a result when developing new packaging solutions.
And so you always have to pay attention to all of these indicators and normally,
the best packaging solution is the one which can reduce all of these indicators.
In short, it's complicated.
However, if there is one thing we know, it's that we may have helpful criteria
or even justifications to dress Corentin, but we are still very far
from having reached the bottom of the U curve which Valentin talked about for all packaging.
We only need look around...
Is all this packaging justified? Does it really
help avoid waste food everytime? For some foods it is an obvious yes,
for others it's more of a case by case thing (like Corentin the cucumber),
and for others still, it's clear that there is too much packaging.
The absolute worst case is when you have a polystyrene tray in which you put a single banana,
the whole thing wrapped in plastic.
Slightly less bad, is a bunch of bananas with a plastic wrap around them.
Then, you can have a bunch of bananas with only a little tab around them
to hold them together.
Better still is having a bunch of bananas with tags that mention their
origin, whether they're organic, etc.
And then, the best case scenario is having a bunch of bananas with just a marking on them,
which can be done directly to the skin without using any extra materials.
So what do can do? Let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone who is expected to design
packaging.
If we wanted to improve the packaging of one of our products, Corentin for example, we
could use one or more of the following 3 methods.
First, reduce the amount of packaging.
It’s obvious! We've been seeing it in recent years with water bottles.
When we open a bottle and it barely stands because how thin the plastic has become,
it's clear that this is the least amount of packaging possible, and in order
to do better, it will be up to us to have a reusable bottle to refill.
Another example that we have also seen appearing these last years:
Perhaps the most striking example that comes to mind is compressed deodorants
or any other kind of compressed product.
The objective behind this is: how can I fit as much product into a smaller package?
That's why we compress or concentrate a product.
In the case of deodorants, they're compressed.
In the case of shower gels, hand soap or laundry detergent, for example,
we usually concentrate them.
Meaning that we're able to get to the same effect with a smaller dose.
Thanks to this, we're saving money both on the product, of course, since we need
less of it for the same use, and on packaging.
For Corentin, by following this principle, we could just remove the plastic,
perhaps by rearranging the dates of harvest or the resell places as I mentioned,
but that's easier said than done.
Or we could perhaps make the plastic wrap even thinner, but not so thin that
it could tear during transit.
Second possibility is to modify the packaging itself.
For example, by making it reusable, like a shower gel bottle that could
be refilled for example.
Or, make it more easily recyclable.
What is meant by recyclable, recyclability, is both that the packaging is adapted
to our recycling channels but also that it is designed to have the least
environmental impact possible.
I'm going to give you an example because this is very abstract, but it partly comes down
to a choice of materials.
The dairy giant Bel participated in this call for proposals to try and develop
Leerdammer's trays to make them recyclable.
They're now made of mono-PET, when before they were made of PET/PE.
When you say it like that, it sounds simple... 4 years.
It took them 4 years to go from using non-recyclable plastic to recyclable plastic.
That’s because when you work with production chains that large, the smallest
detail has been optimized.
And one change brings about a cascade of consequences: does the operculum on top
still stick to the pack if we change the material? Does the label still stick?
Can we print on this material? If this plastic
is more brittle; then if it falls, it breaks and leads to more product waste,
which means it will be necessary to be more gentle in its handling. On the production chain,
there are knives that cut the packaging... except now that you have to change
these knives more often because they are made of a much more abrasive material.
It's crazy right?
That’s why these changes are slow.
It's because we change one little thing and there is a cascade of consequences.
For Corentin, we could replace plastic by something else.
For example, there is a company in the United States that proposes to cover it with an invisible
and edible layer.
I don't know the details or its effectiveness, but in theory, it's a good way
to reduce plastic... and this principle is already used on apples elsewhere.
We paint them with an edible wax to keep them fresh for longer.
Finally, the last way to reduce the environmental impact of packaging is
to encourage us, the population, to sort our waste.
Obviously, if we reduce packaging, we use materials that are easier to
recycle etc, but that packaging ends up in nature, there's no point.
It is difficult for us, as consumers, to create new habits (and I will
refer you to the video on addiction, habits are really powerful).
This is why there is a lot of communication around sorting bins, incentives to recycle, etc.
To help us create these new behaviors, these new habits.
However, this responsibility is not 100% on our shoulders as consumers.
It is also up to sorting centers to have the capacity to recycle, and to businesses
to facilitate the sorting process by designing products that are easy to sort.
Non-dettachable caps, for example, on bottles, the fact that the cap remains attached
to the bottle, that will prevent us from having separate caps ending up in nature,
or not placed in the right sorting bin, or poorly sorted in sorting centers.
So that was our 3 big rules.
With that, we won't become packaging designers but it could help us
understand and criticize the choices made by manufacturers, from what we see in our stores
and to make better choices as consumers.
Let's recap from the top.
Corentin is not sold naked because in the store where he is sold, the time between
his arrival and sale is so long that he would end up withered and
in the trash can rather than in our belly.
Priority has been placed on limiting food waste.
But Corentin’s packaging is far from being a unique case, nor the worst case, and it can
most definitely be improved.
In general, to improve the environmental impact of packaging, we have 3 main options:
to reduce the amount of materials used, to improve the packaging itself and to encourage
sorting.
I hope you understand that the purpose of this video was not to say
how things should be, that is not the role I want to have with
you. I just want to understand the logic behind what I see.
But if you want to re-imagine the world with me, we'll grab a smoothie on the beach to
talk it over... or you can already leave your opinion in the comments, maybe
that will be faster than for us to go and have a drink on the beach.
The video does not end here.
We've gone over a lot of things and I'm sure that you are bursting with questions.
That's why I suggested to Valentin that we organize a livestrean to answer
your questions.
We invite you to come tomorrow, Wednesday 23 June 2021 at 5.30 p.m. French time or 11.30 a.m.
Quebec time, at the link in description.
Write your questions in the comments of this video with #Qlive.
You can also ask questions during the livestream, it's just that logistically,
it's easier for me to have them a little earlier. You can ask questions
on what we talked about in the video but we can also go beyond the management of packaging
and papers or recycling, but be aware that Valentin's answers will only concern
the French territory.
And if you miss the livestream, there will be a replay on this YouTube channel in a week.
With that, see you tomorrow, 5:30 p.m.
It will last an hour.
Bye!