A Retailer’s View on Circular Waste and Packaging by Brooke Donnelly, GM Sustainability, Coles Group

At Coles we have an ambition to create a more sustainable future. This means delivering sustainable, system-based outcomes through a focus on collaboration and shared solutions.

Our sustainability strategy directs our actions towards high-impact initiatives across four areas – energy and emissions, waste, packaging, and sourcing and farming. And within these areas we support initiatives that drive circularity.

For example, we seek to reduce waste to make it more valuable, through reduction, recycling, reuse, and product stewardship, and we work to reduce the amount of packaging, by improving recyclability, reusability and compostability of packaging.

These are big and complex areas that require a re-evaluation of the current linear business models.

Innovate thinking is also required to understand what additional value can be derived and recovered from existing waste streams, and how to overhaul the design of systems and products.

But why is circularity in waste and packaging so critical?

Often discussions about climate change focus on the energy side of things. However, nearly half of emissions is due to what we produce… or put another way, transitioning to a circular economy will address 45% of global emissions1.

There are lots of areas that require “circular” thinking, but Coles recognises we can have a real, tangible, and significant impact in the areas of waste (especially food waste) and in packaging.

Waste

Our waste approach looks at:

• minimising the amount of waste associated with our operations.
• reducing food waste – from the farm through to customers’ homes, and
• implementing product stewardship initiatives that drive circularity.

This sees us working closely with customers, industry, suppliers, and other partners to support the transition to a circular model, where waste is seen as a valuable resource, and manufactured into new materials and products.

To do this, we look across our entire value chain to help change the way resources and materials are used, to help maximise reusability and end of life product options.

Food waste a huge issue globally, with 30% of all food wasted2, every day. Not only is this an incredible loss of food, but it’s also then having a significant impact on the environment – as in Australia, food waste accounts for about 3% of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

We have multiple work steams in place to reduce food waste and try to bring it into a circular model.

These range from the use of black soldier flies, where the larvae convert food waste to protein and fertiliser in 12 days, to the traditional composting system – where food waste is collected from our stores by our waste recovery partners, turned into compost, which is then applied to the land, used to help grow crops, which are then sold again in our stores. The perfect example of circularity at work.

Another area is Coles’ long-term partnerships with food recovery agencies SecondBite and FareShare.

We have partnered with SecondBite since 2011 to rescue unsold, edible food that would otherwise have gone to waste. And to date, we have donated the equivalent of 258 million meals to SecondBite.

The life cycle of the fresh produce we donate is generally around five days. But when SecondBite and FareShare take that food and repurpose it into a frozen meal, it increases the life cycle from what was just five days, to now around one year.

The merger between these two great organisations has also improved the scale of what they do for the community. They’ve gone from local distribution networks to a national distribution system, increasing the scale significantly. The maximisation of this and the optimisation of resources is outstanding.

Packaging

Packaging is essential for some everyday products. It can protect products during transport, extends product life, keeps food safe, and helps to reduce food waste. But it’s often used by consumers and then thrown in the bin.

How do we shift our thinking about how to build a circular model for packaging?

At Coles, we have a packaging framework based on the three pillars of redesign, recycle, and reimagine.

Within this we seek to:

· Reduce unnecessary packaging and remove non-recyclable components where possible.

· Help ensure our packaging is recycled as much as possible, and,

· Find new ways to reuse materials.

Supporting this is a dedicated team that provides expertise and drives sustainable packaging outcomes through the product development process.

In FY24, we had some great achievements in our fresh produce department, as we recognise it is a pain point for some of our customers – and so ripe for innovation.

We launched a range of products in kerbside recyclable packaging – such as:

· Coles’ Unique Selection mandarins in a kerbside recyclable paper bag, instead of a traditional plastic net, avoiding over 11.7 tonnes of plastic net bags.

• Grapes in kerbside recyclable paper bags in Victoria and Tasmania, avoiding over 68.4 tonnes of plastic bags.
• Blueberries in kerbside recyclable and FSC-certified cardboard punnets across 34 Coles stores located on the North Coast of New South Wales.
• And we redesigned salad bowls to 100% post-consumer recycled content which resulted in a 220-tonne reduction of virgin plastic annually.

But the work is ongoing. We continue to engage with government and industry to help ensure that what we do is supporting the shift to a circular economy.

This is where collaboration is fundamental. We know the solutions that are available, but it’s the scale and investment required to make it happen in the real world. And the path forward needs everyone to collaborate and apply a system wide approach to making it successful.

 

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1 Ellen Macarthur Foundation ‘Completing the picture: how the circular economy tackles climate change: https://emf.thirdlight.com/file/24/XoGiOySXvopGQ9Xo4d6XnKIvUh/Completing%20the%20picture%20-%20%20Executive%20summary.pdf

2 Reducing Australia’s food waste – DCCEEW