“Like a sea of plastic”: The fight to make the supply chain sustainable

More retailers than ever are putting their green credentials front and centre and showcasing the work they’re doing to clean up what can be a particularly wasteful industry to attract a growing number of conscious consumers.

But there’s more to sustainability than switching to solar power and cutting single-use plastics. Much of the retail industry’s environmental damage isn’t even being done by retailers themselves, but by their industry partners and peers in the manufacturing, logistics and transport industries. 

According to the National Retail Federation, the major retail body in the US, Scope 3 emissions can account for up to 98 per cent of a retailer’s greenhouse gas emissions, and are far more difficult to manage because, unlike Scope 1 and 2, they are outside of a retailer’s direct control. 

However, some retailers have recognised this issue and are taking steps to fix it within their own business and the partners they work with.

Making the change

In the past 12 months, Snuggle Hunny CEO Julie Mathers has strived to upend and improve the logistical side of the baby wear business. And much of that has involved  rethinking the business’ relationship with plastic.

“When we first walked into the business, it really was a sea of plastic,” Mathers told Inside Retail. 

“Everything was wrapped in plastic, and then we’d ship it bubble-wrapped and in a plastic mailer – it wasn’t good, and I knew I wanted to change that.”

Prior to acquiring and joining Snuggle Hunny in 2022, Mathers ran sustainable beauty marketplace Flora & Fauna, where she created the Take It Back campaign to encourage suppliers to stop shipping  products in plastic and bubble wrap. To Mathers, it was like the brands they were working with were passing the waste problem on to Flora & Fauna.

“We would basically send their plastic back to them with a nice note telling them that we didn’t need it. We’d send it to their CEO, because they needed to see the reality of what they were shipping,” Mathers said. 

But it’s not as simple as removing plastic: “We need to think of new ways to ship products, because some goods can’t get shipped without any kind of protection or they’ll be damaged in transit,” she said.

For example, Snuggle Hunny’s baby clothes are now sent from the manufacturer  to the warehouse in large cartons, rather than individually wrapped in plastic as they used to be. This keeps the products safe during shipping, and the warehouse team can separate the products after they arrive.

Additionally, Snuggle Hunny now sources its shipping mailers from New Zealand-based and female-founded Better Packaging, which creates recyclable shipping containers made up of recycled ocean plastic.

While Mathers would have made these changes regardless, a survey of Snuggle Hunny’s customers found that many  saw the business’ packaging as a pain point: giving the team the impetus to make the changes.

The pros and cons of compostable

Sydney-based Hero Packaging calls itself the ‘first company in Australia to offer home-compostable shipping mailers’. According to co-founders Anaita Sarkar and Vikram Davé, a big part of its business is educating retailers on the reality of packaging waste.

“What we specialise in is helping retailers go from plastic things that aren’t so environmentally friendly, educating them because it’s a bit of a minefield and there’s a lot of greenwashing out there, and then helping them proceed to make better decisions,” Davé told Inside Retail. 

“People will often call up not really knowing what they’re looking for, but if you ask some questions we can pretty quickly ascertain what the gaps are [that need filling].”

Hero Packaging creates different types of compostable mailers that customers can compost at home once they’re used. This includes a relatively new mailer that is dissolvable in hot water.

One drawback to compostable packaging is that it comes with a much shorter shelf life than traditional plastic, and Hero Packaging has started warning customers to make sure they’re not storing mailers for longer than three months.

“Our mailers actually start breaking down after around nine months, and then businesses can’t use them anymore,” Sarkar said.

“Customers will buy 300 or so mailers when they’re launching their products, and if they haven’t used them within nine months they start to biodegrade. So we now have a massive notice on all of our product pages warning people to buy them in smaller increments.

“Compostable packaging is a difficult market to enter, and a lot of competitors have come and gone because they can’t seem to get through that product [before it degrades]. We got a product manager to order production in smaller amounts, and we have a great relationship with our manufacturers that allows us to do that.”

Another business focusing on removing plastic from warehouses is Great Wrap, a plant-based cling film company co-founded by Julia and Jordy Kay that recently launched a compostable pallet wrap. 

Julia previously worked in an architectural firm, and saw the scope of the plastic problem first-hand after watching pallets of product being shipped from warehouses around the country.

“We just saw this vast amount of waste – we have no background in packaging, but we were just honestly frustrated with the state of the world.I recognised that pallet wrap seems insignificant, but it isn’t,” she  told Inside Retail. 

“We partnered with Monash University around two years ago, and still work with them today to develop our formula.”

Great Wrap started off selling compostable cling film for household use, and it’s already in around 50,000 homes. It is now signing deals with major Australian brands for the use of its pallet wrap. Both are made from the offcuts and waste of potato products.

When it comes to improving the sustainability of shipping, a key motivator for Great Wrap, Hero Packaging, and Mathers is knowing that the customer demand is there, and is growing.

“We’ve had customers coming up to us at expos just to tell us that they love what we’ve done with the packaging, and that they love that we’re making the effort,” Mathers said. 

“There’s always going to be people who don’t want it, and who don’t like what you do, but our response has been overwhelmingly positive.” 

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