Press notice

Embargo: 00.01, Monday 28 June 2010

Leading companies design a pathway to greener products

The Designing Out Waste Consortium (1) under the aegis of environment think tank Green Alliance (2), today publishes a new report ‘A pathway to greener products’ (3). The consortium, which includes Asda, Boots UK, Royal Mail, Unilever, Valpak and Veolia, is calling on the new coalition government to help all businesses to improve the environmental impact of the products they produce and sell.

The consortium believes that consumers at all levels of the market want and expect businesses to provide them with better products with lower environmental impacts. As a result, businesses can and should play an important and proactive role in designing out waste. But it argues that commercial and policy drivers must be correctly aligned to incentivise the right products, and the government can play a catalytic role in the development of these drivers at EU and global level.

The report recommends that a progressive government framework for designing out waste is put in place. This will entail:

1. Evaluating product impacts

The government should take a lead in facilitating the development of a practical, low cost and widely adopted way of evaluating product impacts and identifying where action should be taken. This should be done in discussion with businesses, and working with the relevant EU and global institutions.

2. Tackling the product shadow

Government should introduce new measures to tackle the generation of commercial and industrial waste. These could include ambitious sectoral targets and requirements for companies to measure and routinely report material input and output.

3. Towards improved product standards

The government should facilitate the development of a broad set of lifecycle based sustainability performance standards for products. Companies and trade associations should be encouraged to set their own baselines for products and to use these to produce improvement strategies to meet these standards.

An expanded Ecodesign Directive could be one way to ensure that these standards apply across all member states. The UK government should take a proactive stance in EU discussions about how best to do this.

4. ‘Upstream’ incentives to design out waste

Government should explore the potential for upstream incentives to encourage businesses, both in the UK and abroad, to design out waste and design in recovery.

Hannah Hislop, Senior Policy Adviser at Green Alliance, said:

“For the first time leading UK and multinational companies have come together to call for a major overhaul in the government’s approach to designing out waste.

Consumers don’t want to spend time researching their purchases or comparing labels. They don’t want simplistic green spin, but neither do they want a barrage of incomprehensible information. They want environmental responsibility built into all products. But businesses also need a clear government framework and incentives, in the form of commercial and policy drivers, to reconfigure their products along greener lines.“

Julian Walker-Palin, Head of Corporate Policy for Sustainability & Ethics, Asda, said:

“Whilst we believe that business acting alone can make significant moves towards designing out waste in products it will also be essential to have in place the right public policy drivers to create a framework in which these activities can flourish. We hope that this report will help government recognise the challenges but also the opportunities in this area.”

Andrew Jenkins, Sustainable Development Manager – Products, Boots UK, said:

“Understanding and acting on the real environmental impacts of products requires synergy between policy makers and organisations across the supply chain. At Boots UK we adopt this holistic approach within our supply chain. We are pleased to support the work of Green Alliance to develop policy that will reduce the environmental impact of products throughout their lifecycle.”

Dr Tony Taylor, Sustainability & Packaging Technical Manager, Unilever UK, said:

“Our aim is to double the size of our business, but to do so in a way that reduces our total environmental impact. This includes not just our own business operations but also the impacts associated with the total lifecycle of our products. It is an ambitious goal and one which will require new ways of doing business and working closely with others. Working with a consortium, such as this one created by Green Alliance, really helps us explore possibilities and opportunities further.”

Jane Bickerstaffe, Director, INCPEN, said:

“INCPEN is pleased to work with Green Alliance and other stakeholders on Designing Out Waste. We hope that this work will deliver policies that will help companies continue to improve their environmental performance and will support our vision of a sustainable packaging and product supply chain which will enable goods to be produced, distributed, used and recovered with minimum environmental impact at lowest social and economic cost.”

Adrian Hawkes, Director of Policy, Valpak, said:

We have always believed that businesses thrive on competition and market efficiencies and that our role is to harness these drivers to help achieve environmental improvements efficiently. We very much hope that this study will help the incoming administration to develop its resource efficiency programme in a way which businesses can fully embrace.

Dr Stephen Wise, Technical Director, Shanks, said:

“Green Alliance’s project looking at minimising waste within the supply chain is important as it supports wider objectives that stretch beyond national boundaries and impact upon all of us. For Shanks, this project fits with our strategy of creating value from resources discarded by others.”

Matthew Neilson, Head of Environmental Solutions, Royal Mail, said:

“Designing out Waste has been an important step towards mapping the legislative drivers and future actions required to create products and services that are acceptable to a society that strives for a sustainable world.”

Ends

Notes to editors:

1 The Designing out waste consortium is coordinated by Green Alliance. The partner companies are:

Asda

Boots UK

GlaxoSmithKline

INCPEN

Royal Mail

Sainsbury’s

Shanks

Unilever

Valpak

Veolia

2 Green Alliance is an environmental think tank and charity working to ensure UK political leaders deliver ambitious solutions to global environmental issues. Green Alliance was named Think Tank of the Year in the 2009 Public Affairs News awards.

3 To download the report: http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/grea_plist.aspx

For more information contact:

Hannah Hislop, Green Alliance senior policy adviser, 020 7630 4529; hhislop@green-alliance.org.uk
Matthew Davis, 3C, Green Alliance media adviser: 07758 300 007; matthew@3-c.uk.net