Greencap Eco-News | Issue 2 | December 2021

Are your Christmas gifts sustainable?

As part of Greencap's commitment to all things sustainable, the team is pleased to now share this monthly communication where Greencap's own Eco-Sustainability Committee team members provide interesting facts, quick eco-tips, and recent environmental news.

This issue includes loads of interesting information on Australian recycling figures and sustainable shopping practices. Feel free to share with your work colleagues, family and friends.

Did you know?
Each Christmas, Australians could wrap the world in paper nearly four times over!

It’s easy to forget about packaging during the festive season. With the presents stacked high under the tree, it’s unlikely many of us will turn our thoughts towards the packaging of all of these gifts, food and pleasantries. However, when you start looking at the facts and figures associated with Christmas packaging, it can be both surprising and eye opening.

International aid agency CARE Australia determined Australians each use an average of eight metres of paper to wrap their yearly selection of Christmas gifts, for it to be largely ripped off, discarded and destined for bins and landfill. This equates to a staggering 150,000 km of wrapping paper, or enough to wrap around Earth’s equator nearly 4 times from Australia alone!

Reusing paper or boxes from gifts you've previously received, using recycled or recycled content paper (including newspapers, magazines etc), or simply a reusable bag to keep your present a secret until Christmas Day can make a big difference into the amount of landfill generated.

If you'd like to learn more about what you can do to generally buy sustainably, Greencap have also prepared a Sustainable Christmas Shopping Guide to consider when selecting a gift for those celebrating Christmas.

The key things to remember are to:

Buy ethical
But local
Make it yourself
Buy Secondhand
Buy less

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Material Flux Analysis for Packaging

Unfortunately wasteful packaging isn't something confined to Christmas time. Last year's 2020 National Waste Report prepared for the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment includes some sobering figures on plastic, paper and cardboard, and glass waste across the country.

Plastic

Approximately 2.54 Mt or 101 kg per capita of plastic waste was generated in 2018-19 alone in Australia.
Unfortunately the collection efficiency (diversion to sorting from landfill) is also low at 17% (mostly from plastic packaging collections). Sorting and reprocessing losses were close to 12% of collected plastics in aggregate with near on 85% of discarded plastics then sent to landfills, which now contain at least 50 Mt of plastics nationally.

Paper and Cardboard

Australian paper and carboard consumption in 2018-19 was estimated at nearly double that (5.91 Mt) of which about 3.86 was into packaging applications. In this timeframe 41% of paper and carboard was deposited in landfill with at least 270 Mt of paper and cardboard landfilled nationally.

Glass

In this same reported period, Australian glass consumption was estimated at 1.21 Mt, of which over 90% was used for packaging. An estimated 41% of glass was disposed to landfill contributing to accumulated stocks of waste glass in landfill of at least 20Mt nationally.

More details could be found from: National Waste Report 2020 – Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment

What is the Outlook?

Australia’s National Packaging Targets set for 2025 include:

100% of packaging being reusable, recyclable or compostable
70% of plastic packaging being recycled or composted
50% of average recycled content included in packaging (revised from 30% in 2020)

These goals will be met through:

The phase out of problematic and unnecessary single-use plastics packaging
Reducing packaging through design and innovation
Increasing the proportion of reusable packaging
Designing for material recycling
Designing for composability where appropriate

As consumers however there is also plenty that we can all do to support a reduction in packaging through our buying habits such as avoiding over packaged goods (think individually wrapped groceries at the supermarket), reporting examples of unnecessary packaging via the Consumer Packaging Complaints Form and gifting experiences rather than products in general.

What is Greencap doing in this space?

Greencap has an Eco Sustainability Committee who champion the reduction of waste generated from business activities and water usage where possible.

Previous initiatives include organising e-waste collection from offices and a long running association with Clean Up Australia, holding annual clean up events for over a decade before running a coordinated national response as a Silver Business Supporter (since 2017) and now a Gold Business Supporter since 2021.

Other examples include:

Terracycle polypropylene recycling program
Sending e-cards and emails instead of physical cards and letters
Going paper-free on Earth Day
Provision of durable and reusable Greencap bags and water bottles to all team members
Provision of reusable utensils and degradable plates and forks
Labelled bins for general waste, green waste and recycling waste in our offices

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