🌱 Getting in the Circular Spirit: The UK Plastics Pact and East London Liquor Co's 'Project Refill'.
Featuring East London Liquor Company, Abel & Cole, Ella's Kitchen and more...
Happy Monday!
We’re back from our summer break, and this week we’re covering:
The UK Plastics Pact - 2 membership types, 4 key goals and 5 ways for your brand to take action.
Getting in the circular spirit: ‘Project Refill’ by East London Liquor Company.
In case you missed it: 🌱 Circular Partnerships and the Plastic Packaging Tax. Ready? Featuring Elvis & Kresse, The Collective UK, Seedlip and more...
> Quick Take
The UK Plastics Pact - 2 membership types, 4 key goals and 5 ways for your brand to take action.
The UK Plastics Pact was created with the mission of reducing plastic waste and improving plastic recycling by bringing together businesses, governments, and non-government organisations. The end goal? A fully circular economy for plastics. Led by WRAP, it’s the first of a global network of Pacts, and is facilitated by Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative.
The UK Plastic Pact has four key targets to achieve by 2025:
Eliminate problematic or unnecessary single-use packaging through redesign, innovation or alternative (reuse) delivery model.
100% of plastics packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable.
70% of plastics packaging effectively recycled or composted.
30% average recycled content across all plastic packaging.
To achieve this, brands (and any businesses within the plastics value chain) are encouraged to become members. There are two types:
Full business members: Aimed at businesses that place a significant amount of plastic in to the market, or work within the waste management, recycling, reprocessing sectors and have a high degree of influence on the delivery of the targets.
Associate members: Aimed at SMEs, start-ups and companies that have smaller plastic packaging portfolios. One example here is Abel & Cole.
120 businesses have now signed up to the Pact’s targets, from the entire plastics value chain. Amongst these are household FMCG names like Aldi, PepsiCo, Tesco, Abel & Cole, Ella’s Kitchen and more. See who else has signed up here.
Enquire about membership by emailing ukplasticspact@wrap.org.uk
Once your brand becomes a member, what happens next?
When signing up to join the Pact, these brands are guided on what initiatives they can take to work towards the Pact’s goals. Guidance covers 5 key aims, which all work towards the 4 key targets:
Have Pact members listened? So far, it seems so. In September 2021, Morrison’s removed plastic bags from its bananas, resulting in the reduction of 180 tonnes of plastic. PepsiCo removed the plastic lids from its Quaker Oat’s packing, resulting in a 14% reduction in plastic waste.
So, what progress has there been on the Pact’s 4 targets?
Amazingly, company participation in the Pact has led to initial success across all four targets (as reported in their 2020-21 Impact Report):
Target 1: 46% reduction in problematic and unnecessary plastic items since 2018
Target 2: 70% Reduction in the amount of hard-to-recycle packaging
Target 3: 52% of plastic packaging is recycled in the UK, up from 44% in 2018
Target 4: 18% Average recycled content up from 9% in 2018.
According to WRAP, the ‘average level of recycled content’ in Pact members’ plastic packaging is 18%, which equates to saving just over a million barrels of virgin oil production and 140,000 tonnes of CO2e (read more here). The measurable impact of the UK Plastics Pact has led to international launches of the initiative in India, Kenya and other countries globally. However, its collaboration across companies and changes in consumer behaviour have been pivotal to the Pact’s ongoing success.
> Brand Spotlight
Getting in the circular spirit: ‘Project Refill’ by East London Liquor Company.
The first gin, vodka and whisky distillery in East London in over 100 years, East London Liquor Company was founded in July 2014. Now, their bold can and bottle designs can be seen on shelves from Kew Gardens to Swedish supermarkets and back. It’s not just their products that go the distance, it’s their intentions to minimise their impact too - most recently via ‘Project Refill’.
“We looked at all the current schemes out there and we decided that they are broken.”
James Law, Brand Director of East London Liquor Company.
So, to take a step towards a more circular economy in the spirits industry, East London Liquor Co are letting consumers re-use any 70CL spirits bottle that they already own - irregardless of the brand it’s come from. In doing so, they hope to avoid ‘the creation of more ‘stuff’’, opting against the road more commonly taken by brands which prefer refills to be in own-brand containers. In fact, they believe they’re the first premium consumer brand that openly allows a competitor's packaging to be filled with their product.
How does the scheme work for customers?
A customer can take any existing 70CL spirits bottle that they have cleaned to East London Liquor Co’s shops in Bow and Borough Market (with more sites to be added soon).
The customer then selects East London Liquor Co.’s gin, rum or vodka for their refill, and pays the same price as their standard bottles.
Afterwards, a new paper based East London Liquor Co. label and duty stamp will be applied to the outside of the bottle.
The best part? It reduces the emissions of transporting their goods to the shops themselves too. Rather than distributing individual bottles, now, 20 litre containers of spirits are sent to each shop and the refills are filled from there. Going one step further to reduce emissions, they’re working with PedalMe to fulfil their last mile delivery by bike.
A step in the right direction for the distillery, founder Alex Wolpert acknowledges how necessary it is:
“Of course we acknowledge that the production of spirits, like any manufacturing process, comes at a cost for the environment. We know that just by existing we are part of the problem, but we hope this goes a little way to reducing our footprint as we strive to unlock other carbon savings down the line”.
In this spirit (pun intended), Project Refill isn’t the only action that East London Liquor Company are taking. The pending B Corp recently designed their Whisky bottles to have a 60% lower CO2 output (during production) and weigh 48% less, decreasing emissions during transportation. For us, it’s their ability to see a picture bigger than their own bottles and branding which wins our vote.
Support East London Liquor Company via their shop:
> In case you missed it
🌱 Circular Partnerships and the Plastic Packaging Tax. Ready?
Featuring Elvis & Kresse, The Collective UK, Seedlip and more...
> Follow up with…
Article: Where compostable packaging fits in a circular economy
Conference: The Drop - 21st September 2022