Ensuring delivery systems to help keep the nation alive
Packaging is essential. For those outside the industry it may be an afterthought; nothing other than simply a delivery system for a product. It is just something which exists to get that product to your door, or to get the everyday items purchased in the supermarket into your shopping trolley, and from there into your fridge, writes Mark Pawsey MP | PA Images
Packaging is much more than that. It is essential for our continuing national food and drink security.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our new microsite - The Packaging Debate.
Through the site we hope to encourage the sharing of information and views on packaging; a topic that has lately been concentrating minds.
Packaging is essential. For those outside the industry it may be an afterthought; nothing other than simply a delivery system for a product. It is just something which exists to get that product to your door, or to get the everyday items purchased in the supermarket into your shopping trolley, and from there into your fridge.
But packaging is much more than that. It is essential for our continuing national food and drink security.
These delivery systems are integral to the efficient functioning of economies worldwide. Not only do we depend upon them for our food security, so do our supermarkets whose life they sustain. The rapid growth of online shopping has taken this dependence on delivery systems even further – bringing ever more choice and value to the consumer.
Efficient delivery systems – packaging in other words - have become inseparable from the success of our current economic life.
But once the product has been used or consumed, the taken for granted delivery system takes on a new life and it becomes a problem.
Problems require solutions, but when it comes to packaging it is often difficult for our consumer culture to look at itself in the mirror and face hard truths. Rather than looking for solutions, instead there is a scramble to attribute blame and nine times out of ten it is the delivery system, the packaging, that is blamed.
When that blame is combined with littering and the effects of pollution, there can be an understandably emotional response; but this is not constructive when seeking solutions.
A truly successful environmental and circular economy needs to be predicated on facts, economics, and good science. It also requires open, robust and honest dialogue.
The Packaging Debate exists to foster and promote that constructive dialogue and with this goal in mind the UK Food and Drink Industry’s recent Plan for Success provides a great springboard for informed discussion. Not only is it the UK’s largest industry, it is also responsible for the largest use of packaging.
The Packaging Debate looks forward to bringing you a regular supply of information, industry insight and topics for debate in the weeks and months ahead.
We hope you will be a part of it.
Many thanks,
Mark Pawsey MP
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
