Watsonville, Calif.-based Driscoll’s recently signed on to the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, an initiative designed to minimize the environmental impact of plastic.
Driscoll’s plans to support that goal by making progress toward goals in the following areas by 2025:
- Eliminating problematic or unnecessary packaging;
- Moving from single-use to reuse models where relevant;
- Making 100% of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable; and
- Increasing the amount of recycled content used in plastic packaging.
Using less plastic
Product visibility remains a priority in the U.S., where it is common to see shoppers pick up a clamshell of berries and peer through the bottom and sides to get a full view of the product, said Sandor Nagy, group vice president of supply chain for Driscoll’s.
In Europe, on the other hand, consumers are more willing to buy without having a 360-degree look. Another significant factor that supports use of alternative packaging in Europe is that regulatory pressure there is much higher than it is in the U.S. today, Nagy said. In Europe, governments employ frameworks known as extended producer responsibilities and use taxes and financial incentives to push producers and manufacturers to prioritize sustainability.
While alternative packaging may be an easier sell in Europe, there are opportunities for different options in the U.S. as well. Nagy said Driscoll’s will explore some of those possibilities first with its Sweetest Batch and organic offerings.
“In those product segments, organic and super premium, the consumer is generally less cost-sensitive, and so they’re coming to us for not only the best eating and tasting and highest-flavor berries, but also they’re coming after these offerings because we’re doing the right thing as well in terms of how we’re bringing the products to market,” Nagy said.
Using more recycled material
Another significant effort for Driscoll’s is reducing the amount of virgin plastic used in its clamshells. While 60-70% of the plastic content in a clamshell is recycled material already, most of that recycled material is from plastic bottles, which are increasingly in high demand.
“The bottle industry wants to do what we want to do – they want to drive a higher and higher percent of post-consumer content into their beverage bottles,” Nagy said. “So what’s happening is the material that’s available to us is being consumed by the beverage industry, and so the recycled material is actually becoming scarcer and scarcer, and so what we need to do is we need to drive more of the clamshells back into the recycling flow.”
For that to happen, material recovery facilities have to be incentivized to separate clamshells from other waste streams so they can be gathered and processed for reuse in future clamshells. Driscoll’s is working with its packaging suppliers on that effort.
“What those conversations look like is we are requiring our suppliers contractually to increase the amount of what’s called thermoform clean washed flake, and that is used clamshells that come back into the creation of new clamshells,” Nagy said.
Currently, 10% of the content of a clamshell is recycled clamshells that were cleaned and processed. Driscoll’s has a roadmap with its suppliers to increase that amount to 25-30% over the next five years – “an ambitious but we think achievable target,” Nagy said.
“We’re using economic levers and contractual levers to require our suppliers to create a market and to pull, to have a pull effect, for those clamshell materials,” Nagy said.
Retailer support
Walmart and Ahold Delhaize are among the more than 500 organizations that have joined the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is focused on creating a circular economy, is leading the effort in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme.
Nagy noted that over time the influence of those global retailers will propel the whole supply chain toward more environmentally responsible packaging.
“They can exert huge positive pressure across the entire value stream,” Nagy said. “I think what we will find is these large retailers will become increasingly more vocal to the companies that supply them products to do it in a way that’s sustainable.”