Packaging power to the people

If you’ve even been driven crazy by bad packaging – products wrapped in useless layers of unrecyclable plastic that can only be thrown in the bin – the Unpackit Awards are for you.

The Unpackit Awards are a nationwide search for the worst – and the best – packed products in the land. As of April 8 the public can nominate products that they either hate or love, with online voting later in the year deciding which brands get championed – and which are named and shamed.

“We’re doing it to give people a voice,” says Gina Dempster (pictured, with Sophie Ward), one of the brains behind the scheme.

“When we first set up the awards we did a survey of consumers, and found that people were really frustrated with packing. They had a strong desire to buy packaging that could be reused or recycled, but felt powerless to get any change on their own.”

Grassroots change

The idea for the awards was born out of a South Island community recycling project.

In 1999 a group of Wanaka residents had started agitating for a recycling service in their town, which was being run largely at a distance out of Queenstown. The Queenstown Mayor was apparently unimpressed with hippy-dippy notions like recycling, and things were looking bad for the waste-weary Wanaka residents – until one of the team strode into Mayor Warren Cooper’s office and told him she’d be camping there until they were given some land.

Flash forward a decade and Wanaka Wastebusters has turned into a registered charity with a turnover of $1.6 million, over 20 staff, and a philosophy of reinvesting the profits they glean from Wanaka waste back into the community in the form of jobs, services and education.

Gina, formerly an economics lecturer at the University of Otago and an analyst for a London bank, joined the Wastebusters in 2007 when she decided she needed a project she really cared about – and in 2010 she and the other team members hit on the concept for Unpackit.

“We’d been running the recycling centre for nine years and realised we weren’t creating major change diverting packaging from landfill,” recalls Gina. Sure they’d successfully tackled Wanaka’s recycling problems, yet they were still limited to what they could do in their small community – and were still at the mercy of manufacturers.

“We realised we could only recover the packaging materials that had been designed for recycling, and lots of materials we couldn’t do anything about because they had essentially been designed to go to landfill.

“As a recycling centre we didn’t have any way to communicate with the people who were designing or choosing the packaging. There was no feedback loop.”

A national packaging ‘best and worst’ award would be the perfect way to give feedback, they realised – and with financial support from the Waste Minimisation Fund they went nationwide in 2010.

Bouquets and brickbats

Gina enthuses about some of their early winners – especially a company called Potato Pak. The company won in 2011 and was a runner up in 2012 with a product made from potato starch that replaces Styrofoam takeaway containers or plastic plates.

The trays are brilliant on several levels says Gina – they replace something that isn’t recyclable and goes straight to landfill, they give cafés and food outlets a realistic green choice, they’re created from a waste product (the white starch that goes down the drain when you cut up potatoes), and the trays are easy to send back into the nutrient cycle – they can be chucked into a worm farm or on the compost heap at home.

Not so impressive are some of their past Worst Award winners. It’s hard to pick between Foodstuffs – the company behind New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square supermarkets – which was blasted for selling vegetables on Styrofoam meat trays covered in clingfilm, or the company Sunsweet with its product Sunsweet Ones – an unrecyclable plastic tube filled with prunes, which are individually wrapped in more unrecyclable plastic. “It’s really an icon of ridiculous packaging,” laughs Gina. “When you take it apart the pile of wrapping is at least as big as the pile of prunes.”

Impressively though, both Sunsweet and Foodstuffs were gracious in receiving their awards, which goes to show the power behind community-driven awards like Unpackit to drive change. The local distributor for overseas firm Sunsweet said he would take their Worst Award trophy to the next company conference to show the overseas management. Whereas Melissa Hodd, the executive manager of Foodstuffs New Zealand, responded by accepting the company had a responsibility to try harder to reduce wasteful packaging and said an in-house team was looking at the issue.

When Green Ideas checked in with Foodstuffs to see if they’d made good on their claims their sustainability manager Mike Sammons pointed to some significant improvements. A sustainable packaging strategy had been signed off, and now when any packaging is purchased by the company its environmental impact has to be considered. Foodstuffs has also run a trial of compostable food trays made from sugar cane waste and is eyeing a move to 100 per cent recyclable packaging for produce and “private labels” such as the Pams range.

Get involved

This year the awards are being run slightly differently. Nominations open April 8, and in May schools and community groups are being encouraged to get involved. Those who register with Unpackit.org will get an info pack and teaching resources, and there’s money up for grabs for those who help spread the word. When the shortlist of products is finalised and online voting opens in July, the public will be able to give a tick of support to one school or community group as they vote, with the groups with the most votes getting a cut of a $5,200 prize pool.

It’s just another way for people to support their communities – and in doing so take some power back from companies that inflict bad packing on a public that wants change. After all, as they say in the Unpackit team: bad packaging is rubbish.

Labels to look for

If you want to choose packaging that’s compostable, keep an eye out for the reputable ‘seedling’ logo, or the European 'Compost OK' (breaks down in commercial compost) or 'Home Compost OK' labels.

Handy links

www.unpackit.org
Home of the Unpackit Awards

www.smartpackaging.org.nz
Information and resources for businesses and councils from the Unpackit team

www.wanakawastebusters.co.nz
For the latest escapades of the Wanaka Wastebusters

www.communityrecyclers.org.nz
The community of community recyclers

Nominations open

Want to grizzle about a terribly packed product? Or give the thumbs-up to someone doing it right? Go to www.unpackit.org after April 8 and make a nomination.