Green goods to come to the front of Britain's shelves
Posted: Thursday, 10th July 2008, 8:40 pm
Green goods will need to become the normal products on our shelves in the future, while products with a big environmental impact will need to change - and much of the time, consumers won't even notice, Climate Change Minister Joan Ruddock said today.
Publishing progress reports on Sustainable Products and Materials and the Waste Strategy, Ms Ruddock said that the Government and industry were working together to green the whole life cycle of products and services - from the raw materials right through to their use and disposal.
Joan Ruddock said:
"We know people are concerned about their effect on the environment, but they don't get to see the full picture of what goes into producing the goods they buy - and they don't see what happens after they've thrown them away.
"It needs to be easier for people to buy products that will save them money and reduce their impact on the environment - and that's exactly what we're doing. There are real savings to be made - through this action to green the products and materials we use, UK households could save £5 billion a year on their bills.
"Many businesses are already taking positive steps to reduce the environmental impact of their products, and are seeing the real benefits this can have, both for them and their customers. But as fuel prices rise, commodities become scarcer, and families are feeling the pinch, it becomes ever more important for businesses to use resources more efficiently throughout the supply chain, those that don't will miss out on potential savings, as well as big opportunities for growth."
The Sustainable Products and Materials report details the action already underway on making products and materials more sustainable throughout their production, use and disposal, across a wide range of products groups including food, electrical appliances and clothing.
Significant achievements to date include:
The piloting of Product Roadmaps, which aim to improve the environmental performance of ten priority products across their life cycles;
Progress towards saving enough energy to power 1.5 million homes by improving the efficiency of some of the biggest energy using products - set top boxes, external power supply units (such as for laptops, mobile phones, and printers), fridges, washing machines, and dishwashers;
An initiative with retailers to take inefficient light bulbs off the shelves by 2011;
Half of all milk packaging to be made from recycled materials by 2020;
The Government is also publishing the "Policy Analysis and Projections 2008" report which sets out its vision and trajectories for improvement of efficiency of a range of energy-using products including light bulbs, refrigerators, boilers and consumer electronics till 2020 as well as the evidence underpinning its assessment and challenges to industry for the scale of those improvements.
Product Roadmaps
The Government is piloting ten product roadmaps to demonstrate the sustainable products approach for milk, fish, clothing, passenger cars, TVs, domestic lighting, electric motors, window systems, WCs, plasterboard.
Case study - Milk Roadmap
Earlier in the week the Prime Minister called on consumers to waste less food, but what we also need to do is make food less wasteful.
The Government has been working with dairy farmers (producers), milk processors, retailers (supermarkets) and had the support of a dairy industry taskforce to produce a Milk Roadmap.
The Milk Roadmap sets out measures to further reduce the environmental impact of producing, processing and consuming liquid milk. Building on the good work already done within the industry.
The roadmaps aim to capture evidence on the impacts of each product across its life cycle, develop a vision of the future, and agree practical actions to help transform that product (or the market) towards that more sustainable future.
Specifically, the Government is looking at: Environmental Impact, Economic drivers, Production of liquid milk itself, (including covering areas like packaging and transport), Future of the dairy industry, where it was going and where it should be.
What came through most clearly was how interwoven milk is to the natural environment. Cows need good conditions to produce high quality milk, they need feed, the need good land, they need water. In turn cows and the fields they graze in play their part in biodiversity. The dairy industry is also integrated into the beef industry, so by doing this work Government was able to begin the process of change throughout an entire sector.
- By 2020 half of all milk packaging will be made from recycled materials
- Dairy producers have committed to reducing the greenhouse gas balance from dairy farms by 20-30% between 1990 and 2020
- The production sector has undertaken to boost the number of dairy farmers taking part in environmental stewardship schemes to 65%
- It has also undertaken to boost nutrient planning to 90% and animal health plans to 95%, enhancing their ecosystems, improving animal welfare and cutting emissions from soil and fertiliser.
Having secured these agreements the dairy industry are undertaking the following measures to achieve them:
- To send zero ex-factory waste to landfill.
- Large processors will achieve an absolute reduction in water use of 30% through increased water reuse and recycling against a 2007 baseline (small processors to achieve a 20% reduction).
- All tertiary packaging is to be re-usable or recyclable
- Dairy UK will work with dairy companies to extend where feasible Centralised Anaerobic Digesters at processing sites.
- Processors will reduce transport emissions per litre of milk by optimisation or vehicles and transport routes.
- 10% of non-transport energy use to come from renewable sources or Combined Heat & Power/Tri-Generation systems for all processors.
- All liquid milk processing sites will implement a carbon management programme.
- All processors to undertake benchmarking of energy efficiency in terms of CO2 emissions and energy (kWh) relative per tonne of finished product.
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