How crisp packets unwrap the challenges of the circular economy

By Jessica Rawnsley

Whether salt and vinegar, sweet chilli, wasabi or barbecue, most parts of the world have their own take on the crisp. Salty, crunchy, more-ish, it is a globally esteemed snack. But as with many modern-day trappings – enjoyed as a momentary indulgence to be discarded – the packaging lingers on long after the saltiness has left our lips.

According to environmental charity WRAP, 6bn packets of the fried potatoes are consumed each year in the UK alone. Stretched end-to-end, that’s enough crisp packets to wrap around the planet 25 times. Unlike other packaging materials with standardised recycling systems, such as aluminium, cardboard and glass, most of the multi-layered plastic and foil packets end up in landfill, nature or the ocean, where they have been shown to take six decades or more to decompose.

The afterlife of the crisp packet points to a broader global challenge: how to establish a recycling ecosystem in which every material made can be repurposed or reused.

So-called circular economies require a number of interlinked elements, says Rob Opsomer, executive lead for plastics at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an NGO that works with industry and governments to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. First eliminating problematic and unnecessary packaging (typically plastics); designing the rest for recyclability; implementing standardised collection and sorting infrastructure; and ensuring demand for the recycled material.

Both industry and government have a critical part to play. “Businesses have demonstrated it’s possible to redesign their packaging with different materials,” Opsomer says. “Governments are needed for collecting, sorting and recycling infrastructure. The point where the two come together is financing, seen in EPR.” Extended Producer Responsibility schemes, which most nations now have iterations of, hold manufacturers accountable for the entire lifecycle of their products, including funding the costs of collection, sorting and reprocessing.

“One of the most interesting things we’ve seen over the last few years is that businesses are actively supportive of the policy,” Opsomer continues. A statement calling to scale up EPR for packaging was signed by 150 organisations in 2021, including fashion retailer H&M and food companies Nestlé and Danone. Last year, more than 350 businesses signed an open letter in support of the Global Plastics Treaty, which called for reductions in virgin plastics, eliminating single-use and ambitious reuse targets, although UN discussions ended without a deal on this in December. “If you compare that to how businesses have engaged with this in the past, that’s a remarkable shift. But to truly get systems change, we need government intervention. We need global rules.”

Spurred by mounting environmental awareness, technological breakthroughs and government policy, a host of companies have pledged to improve the recyclability of their packaging. PepsiCo has committed to using 50 per cent recycled material by 2030; Coca-Cola to make all primary packaging recyclable by 2025; global packaging company Amcor for 100 per cent of its packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.

But there is a long way to go. No country or material has a 100 per cent recycling rate. Even in places with more advanced systems, such as Europe or the UK, total recycling hovers obstinately under the 50 per cent mark. And statistics underline that packaging contributes the bulk of waste. Fast food packaging accounts for some 80 per cent of the world’s coastline litter, while just 10 plastic products contribute 75 per cent of the rubbish polluting oceans, according to a 2021 study in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“[Globally] we’ve come massive leaps and bounds from 20 years ago, where we were recycling almost no packaging, to today where we recycle a large proportion of it,” says Helen Bird, head of materials systems at WRAP. “But how much we recycle varies per material and it often boils down to the end market. If that material doesn’t have an economic value there’s a market failure which is really hard to overcome.”

On one side there’s metal: highly valuable, durable and easily melted down to reuse for tin cans or the automotive industry – three quarters of the aluminium ever produced is still in use today. On the other side there are flexible plastics and composite materials such as crisp packets: difficult to sort and recycle and often cheaper to manufacture new.

“It would be really, really hard to create a functioning recycling system for something like a crisp packet or candy wrapper,” Opsomer argues. “They’re small, hard to recover and have very little value. Recycling alone is not enough. We cannot recycle our way out of the packaging – and particularly plastic packaging – waste and pollution issues.”

Innovations in materials will be an integral part of the solution. In the past few years, hundreds of alternative materials have exploded onto the market: bioplastics made from renewable sources such as corn, wheat and cellulose; mushroom and seaweed-based packaging; cell-based materials forged in petri dishes.

For Ireland-born Londoner Del Currie, it all started with a penchant for crisps. His daughter opened a zero waste store – where you bring your own containers – and “I could get pretty much everything I needed plastic-free”. But there was one exception: crisps. “I’m a complete crisp addict,” Currie says. “I was always sneaking off to buy crisps and I felt terrible every time I threw the empty packet in the bin, knowing it would go to landfill.”

Discovering there was no alternative on the market – and after much trial and error, and time and money spent – in 2022 Spudos was born. The company’s “crisp kits” are sold in 500g (16 standard bags) or 1kg (about 30) reusable containers, alongside paper shake bags and a set of flavouring “Spud Dust” sachets. The packaging – a laminate made from Nature Flex (wood cellulose) and Tipa (bioplastic) – is home-compostable. It performs in the same way as petro-based packaging but decomposes in weeks rather than decades and does not require industrial facilities to do so.

Spudos supplies corporate customers such as Google, pubs and restaurants, and sells direct to consumers via its website – some 50,000 customers to date. After securing £50,000 of investment in February on the UK TV programme Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs compete for backing, Spudos launched at London Zoo in May. While world domination is not on the horizon, “it’s a bonkers-sized market”, Currie says, so capturing even a couple of per cent of the family-pack market would be momentous.

“But people don’t buy from us because we’re a sustainable brand,” he adds. “The great thing is, you have Joe Bloggs in Manchester who just loves crisps and he is buying Spudos because they’re brilliant, he can season them himself, and it’s a beautiful bonus that he’s doing something better for the planet in the process.”

To what extent are consumers responsible for boosting recycling? Bird at WRAP says education and incentivisation are vital: if materials are not collected, a circular economy is impossible. Opsomer argues “it’s not right to put the burden on individuals”, particularly “as it’s really hard to do the right thing in today’s system”. Rules vary widely by region and neighbourhood; large amounts of food wrappings are non-recyclable.

Both are emphatic that policy instruments and regulation are crucial – and a raft of measures are on the way. The UN treaty on plastic pollution – the next negotiation set for August – is the “biggest opportunity we’ve ever had to radically accelerate the scaling of these solutions” and transition to a circular economy, Opsomer says. By 2030, complementary EPR regulations in the UK will obligate local authorities to collect soft plastics such as crisp packets from homes and workplaces.

The future of crisps might be seasoned with innovation – but the real crunch remains in continuing to rethink packaging.