In the fiercely competitive world of retail, first mover advantage can bring rich rewards. However in largely untested waters such as environmental innovation there are many barriers to change. This came home to me when WRAP worked with a group of confectionary brands to find ways of reducing the packaging around Easter Eggs: they were understandably cautious about acting alone: would less packaging make the eggs look smaller and less attractive to customers and therefore put them at a competitive disadvantage, hitting sales?

The clear message was that they would move together collectively but not as individual organisations.  I was delighted that they decided to move forward as a group, supported by WRAP - with some groundbreaking results.

I believe this “Easter Egg Principle” helps explain the underlying strength of the voluntary sector agreements which WRAP has developed to help business achieve benefits from environmental innovation.  We have just very successfully launched the second phase of the Courtauld Commitment to encourage the more sustainable use of resources throughout the grocery sector supply chain. Our portfolio also includes similarly successful – if lesser known agreements - in the construction and home improvement sectors.
 
The added value WRAP brings is to ensure a common understanding of targets, robust tools for gathering data and tracking progress, and a fair way of reporting results.  It is also the ability to bring together the relevant parts of the supply chain to work together to overcome barriers, and to raise the profile of waste reduction within businesses.

The result is that key players in the sector have the confidence that this agreement will lead to real change on a level playing field. The benefit for customers and wider society is innovation and change which delivers real environmental benefits.

In promoting these sector agreements WRAP has absolutely no desire to stifle innovation, or prevent a business going alone to set the pace. Far from it. We often join forces with innovative businesses on ground breaking pilots which develop solutions which can then be rolled out as best practice across a sector.

Many of the issues being raised about how best to limit the environmental impact of goods and services raises tricky issues for which there is no simple answer. For example, WRAP research showed many of the environmental gains we could make from being a more resource efficient society were dependent on significant shifts in consumption and production. Helping to understand the implications of those shifts - social and economic – is, I believe, an important role WRAP can play. 

Phase 2 of the Courtauld Agreement represents a huge leap in the work to reduce the impact of packaging and tackle waste in the sector supply chain and in households.  The focus has moved away from solely weight based targets and now includes reducing carbon emissions. As one commentator remarked it may well be “the end of the beginning” on the path to get us away from the facile concept of “all packaging is bad”, to “how can we make packaging as environmentally beneficial as possible”. This raises some interesting questions about how we can develop all-inclusive environmental metrics, how we start to measure the impact of products and so on. This is an area WRAP will investigate with Industry, Government and academia over the coming years.

The new voluntary commitment has  received terrific support with 29 retailers and brands signing up at launch. I believe the strength of this model is that WRAP can act as an honest broker, ensuring clearly understood targets and robust way of gathering data and monitoring progress. It is now down to WRAP, the signatories, and wider industry  to work together to deliver results.