The European Union’s new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation starts to apply this month. Although not everything will change over night, the direction of travel is clear: less single-use packaging and more reuse. And while a sachet of ketchup may seem like an insignificant place to start, environmental progress is rarely made through one big change. Sometimes it is the accumulation of small ones that matters.
I have always been fairly positive about incrementalism when it comes to sustainability. We are unlikely to transform the environmental impact of hospitality overnight, but we can keep looking for places where a relatively small change can make a measurable difference. Single-use packaging is an obvious area to examine, particularly when an alternative can be used again and again.
That alternative does, however, come with its own footprint. A reusable sauce container has to be produced, transported, filled, collected and washed. Washing requires water, energy, detergent and labor. The environmental case for reuse therefore depends on the whole system rather than simply on whether something is labeled reusable.
Interesting challenges
Reuse can outperform single-use alternatives environmentally, particularly when containers are used enough times and washing is efficient. For hospitality, that creates an interesting challenge. A sachet is remarkably efficient from an operational perspective. It arrives clean and sealed, takes up little space and requires no washing. Reusable alternatives ask restaurants to incorporate another small process into their daily operation. Someone has to collect the containers, wash them, refill them and return them to service. For a busy restaurant, those details matter.
Perhaps this is also where regulation can encourage innovation: if restaurants are going to move away from single-use portions, there is an opportunity to rethink how condiments are served rather than simply replacing one container with another. Refillable dispensers, larger shared containers and different service models could all play a role, depending on the type of hospitality business. What works in a fast-food restaurant may look very different from what works in a hotel breakfast buffet.
The important thing is that we look at the system as a whole. Sustainability is rarely as simple as replacing one material with another. It is about how something is produced, transported, used and eventually disposed of. The same principle applies to reuse: its environmental benefit depends on how well we make the system work.
Clear directions
There is also a useful role here for regulation. Individual restaurants cannot redesign packaging supply chains on their own, and operators should not be expected to become environmental engineers on top of everything else they already do.
If legislation creates a clear direction, suppliers can develop better systems, manufacturers can invest in reusable solutions and hospitality businesses can gradually adapt.
That is where I think the idea of incremental progress becomes useful: we don’t need every environmental measure to transform the world on its own, but a lot of measures that make sense, work in practice and collectively move us in the right direction.
Every little helps. The trick is making sure that every little actually helps.
Marius Zürcher
About the author:
The co-owner & founder of Millennial & Gen Z marketing and employer branding agency 1520 in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, Marius Zürcher was a participant at FCSI’s ‘Millennials’ focused roundtable at INTERGASTRA and a speaker at FCSI workshops about industry trends.
