SEBASTIAN Munden, chair at WRAP and former Unilever UK & Ireland CEO, will share insights on scaling reuse and refill during a panel at London Packaging Week next month.
The session will explore how the UK Packaging Pact will drive circular change across industries. The UK Packaging Pact, building on the work of the UK Plastics Pact, seeks to reduce single-use packaging.
Sebastian Munden was a founding signatory of the UK Plastics Pact in 2018 on behalf of Unilever. He has guided brands to rethink packaging as both a business model and a sustainability lever. He will share insights during a panel at London Packaging Week, titled “Refill, Reuse, Rethink: The UK Packaging Pact and the circular economy in action”, where he joins fellow experts from Tesco, WWF, GoUnpackaged, and SUEZ to explore the Pact’s vision, the challenges they seek to overcome, and how cross-industry collaboration is essential to create a packaging system fit for the future.
“I suppose I would say, without getting overconfident, it’s worth reflecting on the progress that has been made so far in taking a much more thoughtful approach to packaging – eliminating unnecessary materials, changing materials where it made sense, and really starting to focus on increasing reuse,” Sebastian said. “A lot of progress has been made, and we know what the next steps need to look like.
“Working with governments across the UK and the reprocessing industry, we need to finish what we’ve started, especially on wrappers and films. The next big opportunity to reduce packaging costs and material use is to imagine the exciting innovation opportunities in reuse and refill. So that would be it: finish the job on what we’ve started and grasp the big opportunities with new business models in refill and reuse.”
Sebastian added that scaling innovations presents its own challenges.
“A lot of recipes and reuse trials and pilots have taken place, which have given a huge amount of learning. Of course, it’s not always clear to everybody what’s being tested. Sometimes it’s the logistics that are being tested, sometimes it’s the actual nuts and bolts, sometimes it’s the presentation in-store. But it’s very hard to test at scale because one or two items in a category, or even more challenging, one or two items presented in an aisle outside that category, will never give you a full picture.
“To create a viable economic solution, there needs to be an understanding of how it can work at scale in a category and across many stores. We also need to consider where the packaging can be returned to and how it gets back. WRAP has been pulling together an initiative with many UK retailers to work together on this because a certain interoperability is required to make it work, figuring out how to scale practically.”
Consumer behaviour is pivotal factor, with circular systems unable to succeed without acceptance and adoption.
“We weren’t born knowing how to shop in a supermarket, all behaviours are learned,” Sebastian continued. “What we’re talking about here is helping people relearn behaviours, making it as easy and beneficial as possible, and treating this as commercial innovation rather than simply ‘doing good.’ It has to be attractive to shoppers and solve problems for them as well.”
