Brands and the Environment - October News

Many major news outlets carried the big P&G announcement, including the Grocer and BBC, that Procter & Gamble plans to take 9,000 tonnes of virgin plastic out of its supply chain every year.

The move, which will roll out in early 2020, will see 300 million Fairy, Viakal and Flash bottles converted to 100% recycled or partially recycled plastic bottles using post-consumer and post-industrial resin. P&G said this was “ equal to the amount of waste generated by 6.5 million Europeans per day”.

“We are proud of this significant milestone across our cleaning products as we know with our immense scale we can create a positive impact” said Elvan Onal, P&G vice president for home care products in Europe.

Matt Reynolds of the Wired launched into an attack on Ryanair this month because what of he saw as the worst king of PR and ‘greenwashing’. It all started with an advert

“Everybody knows that when you fly Ryanair you enjoy the lowest fares. But do you know you are travelling on the airline with Europe’s lowest emissions as well?” reads one advert.

The claim arises because Ryanair was using the figures for the CO2 produced per passenger kilometre. Ryanair’s figure – and the reason why it can lay claim to being Europe’s “lowest emissions” airline – is 67 grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre. That’s the lowest for any EU airline.

So far so good you might have thought. But, as Reynolds points out this is more than a little disingenuous and arises because of the short haul nature and the number of passengers per flight, rather than actually making any environmental improvements to their brand.

Of the European Union’s ten biggest carbon dioxide emitters, nine of them are coal-fired power plants. The tenth is Ryanair, the low-cost Irish airline which released 9.9 mega tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2018 – a 6.9 per cent increase from 2017.

Brands realise the importance of going green, but when you lie and get caught out, and you will, you can turn everyone against you.

Pavilion was particularly interested in the announcement by the announcement that John Lewis and Waitrose would remove plastic toys from their Christmas crackers this year. This came from the realisation that novelty products may have their place, but it is unacceptable for them to be made of plastic, particularly ones that are commonly forgotten about before people dig into dessert. As a promotional products supplier surrounded by competitors selling single use novelty nonsense made from plastic, we are so pleased to see a big brand taking a position of this. We are not against fun, not against the giveaway just against the single use plastic