In the UK we generate 5 million tonnes of plastic a year, half of that is used for packaging. Plastics are the third most used material in packaging, yet the least recycled in the UK, and even despite concerns about the natural environment and the impacts plastic pollution can have on all living species, our use of plastics continues to rise. This project's important because plastic pollution is an urgent global concern, it affects us in terms of our health, our sustainability, and also is important in terms of thinking about different solutions. The whole purpose of this research is to have an impact in the real world, we want to see change, we want to see less plastic pollution in our world, and so we need to have an impact in the businesses, the councils, and all members of the circular supply chain.
The plastic packaging in people's lives is taking a holistic approach to rethinking the consumer attitude behaviour gap, and we're using food plastic packaging as an exemplar. And the holistic approach recognises consumers don't operate in a vacuum, so they operate within infrastructural and market conditions, so we are looking at the pre-consumption elements, the supply chain consumption elements working with households, and post-consumption elements where we're thinking about what happens to plastics after they get discarded. We've been working closely with businesses, supermarkets, waste management organisations, local councils, and with consumers for three and a half years to try and get a deep understanding of what it is people are doing in relation to food plastic packaging. The purpose of this project is to help us get a deep understanding of the disconnect between what people see in relation to food plastic packaging and what they do in terms of reducing and recycling their plastic packaging. We have experts here from consumer behaviour, myself and other colleagues, we have experts on supply chain management, we've experts on waste management, but we've also brought in colleagues from other parts of the university, for example chemistry, material sciences. What that does is allow us to take an interdisciplinary approach to bring different perspectives to this problem in order to get a really deep understanding of the problem and potential solutions. It's really important to work with councils and businesses on projects like this because it's a practical problem, and unless we really understand the constraints under which councils and businesses operate, we cannot find practical solutions. The plastic packaging in people's lives project has worked with over 90 organisations and over 500 participants have been involved, and it's really important to get people's perspectives who are involved in these activities, producing plastics, managing plastics, disposing of plastics, recycling plastics, repurposing plastics to actually get the nuances of what practices are happening, because if you can't understand those nuances, then you can't create responsible change. So for example, we can talk to businesses and find that they can't get hold of alternative packaging that they'd like, so we then need to talk to other members of the supply chain to find out what's causing that scarcity. So my role as improvement lead at Lancaster City Council involves a number of different areas, that can range from waste and recycling to climate change, projects and projects that will help to assist residents within the community. The involvement with the PPiPL project really encompasses some of the work that I support and help carry out within our team to look at waste disposal, waste disposal behaviours and how we can improve that for residents within the district. We were originally approached by Lancaster University in Allison to see whether we could assist initially for some time really in regards to plastic packaging especially from a food perspective, but as the project has expanded and gone on, we've allowed the team to come into our stores, engage with our customers and get a bit more customer insight into packaging and how they understand the role of packaging within food production and ultimately what they do with it afterwards and the impact on the environment. So sustainability is really important to us at Booths, it's about us understanding what our customers want, how we can make some impactful changes and moving things forward from an environmental standpoint, it's about us helping to educate our customers into a sustainable way of living. It's helpful for the retail industry to understand exactly what we can do to support our customers and our communities, the insights we receive via the university and also partners within the P project is invaluable to us. We collect our own data and we have to report in terms of waste data, flow data and what we're doing with our recycling, but there's always better ways and things to look at to make those improvements and drive some of that work that we try to do with our residents, and to do that we need others on board which includes the university and locally their partners. I think businesses and councils are really receptive to this because they want to solve the problem, but there are so many constraints that they are preventing them from making the progress they want, so they're really welcoming help to think this through and to try and find ways that which they can all work together to find a solution that works for our world.