Monthly Archives: December 2018

New Resources and Waste Strategy: what it means for you and your business

On the 18th December 2018, the UK Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, unveiled the Resources and Waste Strategy.

It aims to eliminate avoidable plastic waste by making businesses and manufacturers pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging. This ambitious plan is the first major overhaul of England’s waste system in over a decade, but comes at a price.

There will be a legal responsibility placed on businesses to take greater responsibility over the waste they produce. This will include large items, such as cars and electrical goods, as well as smaller items such as plastic waste and batteries.

Businesses will not be the only ones affected by the scheme though: householders will see a positive change to the current recycling system, with government plans outlining a more streamlined, consistent and simplified system to be implemented across the UK.

According to Michael Gove, the strategy “will go further and faster, to reduce, reuse and recycle. … We will cut our reliance on single-use plastics, end confusion over household recycling, tackle the problem of packaging by making polluters pay, and end the economic, environmental and moral scandal that is food waste.”

Businesses and industry will be expected to pay higher fees for products that are harder to recycle, repair or reuse. However, the money raised by this scheme will go back into the recycling and disposal system through “Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)”, which is predicted to raise between £500million and £1billion a year. EPR also aims to incentivise producer to design products that are easier to re-use, dismantle and/or recycle. This should extend the lifespan of a product and will encourage reform in the UK’s packaging industry.

The government has also proposed an introduction to more consistency in the recyclable materials available for collection, making it easier for businesses to know what products that can use to help reduce their costs. They also want to encourage manufacturers to design products that can last longer, to drive up levels of repair and reuse, and to explore mandatory guarantees and extended warranties on products.

At Vesta, our innovative product designs can assist businesses and homes adhere to the new government strategy. Using IoT technology, our smart containers know when they’re running low, and re-order their contents automatically. Our product can make positive changes to business resource and waste management by providing you with waste-reducing alternatives that are refillable, durable and in line with the new UK policy. Using Vesta products will reduce your costs because our products help eliminate the need for damaging single use plastics from global supply chains. We can assist you in creating an efficient and sustainable business models for the benefit of all.

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Accountability and Convenience at the Heart of New Sustainability Initiatives

It’s been an exciting news day in the world of sustainability, with the announcement of several complementary schemes to tackle single-use packaging and the plastic epidemic. This got us talking at Vesta about accountability as an incentive to act in an environmentally responsible way, and about how easy it is to opt out of recycling if the local authority seems to have done the same.

A quick straw poll at Vesta HQ this morning revealed the vagaries of the postcode lottery, with widely different experiences of recycling across the three London boroughs and one county council in which Vesta staff live. Widening it out to family members revealed seemingly limitless permutations of coloured bins, separating, and effort involved, all of which acts as a disincentive to recycle household waste. In addition, blocks of flats and multiple occupancy buildings offer a further challenge, and often see anonymous piles of waste for landfill because services are stretched and there is no possibility of sanctions for failing to designate recycling.

When ease and accountability plummet, so too does the incentive to do the right thing.

The schemes announced today, broadly, are as follows:

Consumers will be charged a returnable deposit on packaging.
Household recycling will be demystified and streamlined, and county and city councils will aim to eliminate the postcode lottery of waste management services.
Businesses will be charged for using polluting and hard-to-recycle materials when producing and packaging their goods.

Done properly, with everyone accepting their share of responsibility for their consumption, these schemes could combine to offer a real alternative to the single-use paradigm. Recycling should be made clear and easy, and in turn there should be financial sanctions for those who fail to comply.

Vesta CEO Tom Mowat has talked here about the ways in which convenience and profitability offer one of the best routes to sustainability. This concept is at the core of our smart refillable containers and of everything we do: seamless services which allow people to make the environmentally appropriate choice.

Towels and Netflix: how hotel stays and film nights provide a model for sustainable change.

There have been major changes in my lifetime. My phone used to be attached to a wall in the hallway of the house I grew up in, for example, whereas now I don’t even have a landline. Technology facilitates changes in behaviour, so that what was once commonplace becomes rapidly antiquated.

At Vesta Smart Packaging, we are trying to facilitate one such change. Our packages monitor and report how full they are, reordering automatically. They will change the way that people and businesses shop for day-to-day essentials, so that we can cut single-use plastic out of the supply chain. It is an intimidating challenge, but we are encouraged by examples of changes made by other businesses which have had a major environmental impact (whether they intended it or not).

On a recent holiday, I saw the now-ubiquitous sign asking that the towels in the hotel be reused. All over the world, hotels now use these signs to save countless millions of unnecessary washes. And it feels like it happened overnight. A simple confluence of ideas that improved efficiency and helped the environment was enough to affect global change.

Later that evening, I watched a couple of episodes on Netflix, and was struck for the first time by the environmental impact that it and other streaming services have had. DVD sales, and trips to rental shops, have declined massively – almost completely in the latter case – and the plastic savings must be enormous. But it was never intended that way. Streaming services offered convenience, and choice, and almost immediately eradicated the old way of watching films on hard copy, which has gone from commonplace to exceptional.

The adoption and usage of smart packaging to cut single-use plastic in supply chains will be a similarly massive change. However, as we develop our product – combining convenience for consumers and efficiency for businesses, these two simple examples provide much needed encouragement, and demonstrate that behavioural change at this scale is eminently possible.