I have a guilty pleasure. Crisps. Also known as potato chips, these salty snacks have been a greedy favourite indulgence of mine since I was old enough to grab a handful of Wotsits from a bowl with a chubby hand and stuff them into my fat little face. If you haven’t had the pleasure of a cheesy Wotsit because you’ve never lived in the UK, get yourself to your nearest foreign foods aisle and look in the Great Britain section for these glorious orange puffs and live your best life, which definitely includes licking the powder off your fingers after the contents of the bag have been hoovered up.
Crisps
At home in Britain we are particularly good at crisps, but I love trying the unusual flavours you can’t get here when I travel. Scandinavians love dill flavour, in the Mediterranean you can snack on oregano and paprika flavour, while in the States there’s such out-of-this-world options as ‘burger van’ and pizza flavour. There’s literally a whole world of crisps I would like to try.
The problem is, I am acutely aware of the unsustainable journey my empty crisp packets make once I have scoffed their contents and with the roar of the anti-plastics brigade growing ever-louder, I worry that even a love of crisps as fervent as mine cannot reconcile the guilt within me that I am contributing to the world’s overflowing landfill.
A campaign pressuring Walkers Crisps (which coincidentally are headquartered in Leicester where I grew up) to be more sustainable in its packaging choices claims there are no crisp brands available in the UK that are plastic-free. Furthermore, in 33 years’ time, there will be 200 billion packets of crisp on planet Earth – and I’ll wager at couple of thousand of those will be mine.
Crisp packets are made from BOPP, BoPET and polyethylene film which is metallised, making it unrecyclable. The metallic barrier layer is what keeps our crisps from going soggy. If we reverted to paper packets, the ingredients would become exposed to the atmosphere and go off a lot faster than they do currently. This means more food waste, more production and in general a poor deal for the crisp manufacturer’s carbon footprint.
Crisp manufacturers are looking into more sustainable packaging. In 2010, Walkers was exploring environmentally-friendly crisp packets using starch waste from the potatoes it processes. Eight years on and these potato starch bags have not yet replaced the polyethylene bags we see in the shops, nevertheless the brand is committed.
“Walkers is working tirelessly to tackle waste challenges, allocating significant resources and attention to this important issue.” the Pepsico-owned company says on its website. “We have committed to 100 per cent recyclable, compostable or biodegradable packaging across our product portfolio by 2025, and are collaborating with leaders in this space to bring the latest packaging advances to our products.”
Noble words for a company that makes 10 million bags of crisps every day.
So what obstacles does Walkers have to overcome in order to achieve these goals?
Walkers has to make its crisp packaging recyclable, while keeping the barrier properties and ensuring its carbon footprint does not grow. The packaging has to be attractive, it has to function and it has to be inexpensive. Tall order or what?
Why are crisp packets unrecyclable?
Our colleagues at Impact Solutions gave us the industry opinion on this – and look at the hand-wringing posts about crisp packets being unrecyclable and you won’t find a recycling expert among any of the interviewees…
Crisp packets weigh next to nothing so in order to bring their volumes up to a usable weight you have to collect a heck of a lot of them. Separating these sorts of volumes from ordinary waste is expensive and will take a lot of time to get them up to quantities of material you can use. This not only takes time, but it uses energy.
Once you have sorted the crisp packets from the general waste and recyclables, you have the metallised film to contend with, which once stripped out reduces the weight of an already miniscule product further.
Next, we have the small matter of food contamination, using more energy and chemicals to cleanse the material of the foodstuffs it has been packaging. The costs of processing plastics that have been used in food-contact applications is considerable but necessary to meet EU regulations, but is the cost justifiable for such little product?
Plastic films such as crisp packets could have an end-market as a recycled plastic as they can be added to plastic wood through affordable reprocessing, because it is a low value-high weight application, but the carbon usage mathematics is stacked against this second life as a viable option.
Impact Solutions believes these types of materials can be given their second life through chemical recycling, but material separation still makes this a less economical option.
Much of the mainstream coverage of the scourge of crisp packaging gives your humble Wotsits packet a fork in the road choice once its delicious contents have been devoured: landfill or litter. But there is a third option.
Wotsits
Wotsits, for the uninitiated.
Waste-to-energy (which sounds a lot nicer than incineration) is a way of reclaiming some of the energy spent in producing the crisp packet. The Clean Tech Guide states that plastics' calorific value per kilo is over 9,000, compared to 5,000-6,000 per Kcal per Kg for coal making it an efficient source of fuel. If waste-to-energy is generating heat and energy thus limiting fossil fuel consumption then surely this is a better than landfill or litter? Particularly when efficient waste-to-energy plants are equipped with filters.
Indeed CEWEP (the Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants) revealed that In Germany in 2000, the dioxin emissions from waste-to-energy plants was less than 0.5 g per year, compared to 400 g in 1990.
So until Walkers’ 2025 deadline for more sustainable crisp packaging, maybe waste-to-energy is the most efficient way to dispose of crisp packets for now if product integrity and overall carbon expenditure is the aim of the game, as recycling is less feasible?
“[Crisp packets] are food contaminated, so the costs of processing are sky high. All of which makes energy-for-waste a good option,” Impact Solutions stated.
It is difficult to know where your crisp packets will end up when you bin them, but if they can be separated for waste-to-energy, this is the ideal outcome. It’s down to the authorities to recognise the benefits of separating the materials that cannot be recycled or are hazardous and make the investment in sorting them for waste-to-energy.