By Katherine Price, Sustainability Editor, H&C News: ‘It needs to be back on the agenda’: has hospitality’s plastic wave rolled back post-pandemic?
Despite successful campaigns and increasing customer awareness in recent years of the need to combat the rising tide of unnecessary single-use plastic and packaging, the Covid-19 pandemic was inevitably going to have a negative impact on these gains in the sector.
The antibacterial wipes, plastic hand sanitiser bottles and single-use face masks were an unavoidable necessity that sadly meant a lot of initiatives quickly unravelled, with businesses and suppliers forced to revert to single-use and disposable.
“It needs to be put back on the agenda again, there was so much momentum behind it and all that goodwill was there – but is it now going to be hindered by supply chain issues and price constraints?” questions Luke Holder, chef-director of Lime Wood hotel in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, who sparked the #chefsagainstplastic campaign in 2018.
Even Holder himself admits he fell back into old habits due to pandemic health and safety requirements. He’s revisiting and re-evaluating operations now – however he highlights multiple pressures and challenges that did not exist four years ago could prove difficult to overcome.
For instance, he says more items are reverting to plastic due to price and production pressure on glass, the value of cardboard has “dropped through the floor” and sourcing milk pergals is proving “a bit of a nightmare”.
He says the hotel’s dairy supplier has been unable to secure a deal on the new cost of the plastic inners for milk pergals, meaning the hotel has had to revert to single-use, two-litre plastic milk cartons, of which it goes through more than 20 a day.
“There are so many complicating factors now – the fuel crisis, Brexit, and now with the drop in the pound, importing things becomes a hell of a lot more expensive at a time when people are trying to save money,” he adds.
Holder feels legislation is needed from the government to move back the dial on plastic and packaging but is cynical this will happen in the current climate. Despite wins in recent years on green energy, for instance, market pressures, particularly the war in Ukraine, have seen prime minister Liz Truss lift a moratorium on fracking.
We could be moving in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing plastic and packaging despite the fact that, this year, microplastic pollution was detected in human blood for the first time, an alarming and ominous reminder of what not taking action could mean not just for our planet but us.
But there are leaps forward to be positive about and some gains have been made even post-pandemic. Scotland has confirmed plans to launch a Deposit Return Scheme next August, while across the UK a Plastic Packaging Tax was introduced in April for manufacturers and importers.
Some hospitality operators are taking the initiative, such as motorway services operator Roadchef, which has partnered with Costa Coffee and McDonald’s UK to launch a cup recycling programme at its 30 sites across the UK. Wagamama replaced its usual delivery bowls with recyclable alternatives, which can be returned to any restaurant from next month, while Burger King UK just finished a five-month trial of usable and returnable packaging across five of its restaurants in East Anglia.
Oli Williamson, head chef at the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, has been looking at how the three-Michelin-starred restaurant can reduce its plastic usage over the last year and a half and has shared on Instagram the alternatives he has found.
“I just started reaching out to suppliers and asking ‘can we swap that vinyl glove for that bio glove?’ That was the easiest transition, but some of it took a bit longer, like testing clingfilm,” he explains.
He says it took time to source, test and arrive at products that worked well enough for use in a busy fine dining kitchen, but some of the swaps have even saved him money.
The biodegradable gloves his kitchen team now uses are a third of the price of those they used before, while the restaurant is recouping the money it invested in silicon lids by not buying the £1,000 worth of clingfilm it previously did. And the single-use piping bags they used to use were 50p each – the reusable, biodegradable piping bags they now use are just 3p each.
Not everything has been possible to swap and the hardest thing to replace has been vacuum pack bags that can withstand high enough temperatures for cooking. But Williamson points out that new products are being developed “all the time” and operators “have to be patient”.
“We are fairly confident that we’ve got very good replacements – but now we need to look at how we use less of them,” he continues.
“Because you’re using brown roll which doesn’t have any plastic, that doesn’t mean you can use twice the amount of it – we need to assess now how to reduce the replacements we’ve got, which is harder because it’s a fine tune and you’ve got to be on people more, just saying ‘you don’t need that much’.”
Williamson has also created a sustainability committee for the team to get together and discuss any ideas or improvements once a month.
“Just having these conversations has really helped,” he says.