Tackling misleading claims, dealing with complex and unclear definitions, ensuring that legislation lives up to its full potential… Together with the Rethink Plastic alliance, in 2021 we strived for plastic-related laws and standards to work for the planet!

 

Plastic is a persistent pollutant. Better policies and standards can make a big difference in reducing our dependency on it. The EU-wide ban on single-use plastics introduced in July 2021 is a good example of this power.

Standards and laws can achieve even more, however. At ECOS we believe that plastics should be used only when functionally needed, and that they should be toxic-free by law. We work towards a world where reuse is made easy for all thanks to widely available reuse and refill options, based on harmonised packaging and corresponding infrastructure. 

Unfortunately, nudging governments into passing effective laws against wasteful single use plastics is not easy, and rules around plastic are full of technicalities. However, 2021 brought some important steps in the right direction.  

Too good to be true? Green claims under scrutiny

We strongly believe that companies wishing to boast about the environmental performance of products must do so by providing consumers with full and frank information. However, the use of green claims and environment-related labels on plastic products has become almost mainstream, opening the door to greenwashing on a massive scale.

In our 2021 report entitled “Too Good to be true?”, published in cooperation with Rethink Plastic alliance and Break Free From Plastic movement, we put forward ways to improve green claims and labels to ensure their environmental ambition, transparency and trustworthiness. We developed a clear checklist for identifying ‘ideal’ claims (and dubbed it ECOS Ideal Claims Checklist), which is both a benchmark and a set of recommendations for brands, policymakers and standardisers on how to offer relevant, reliable and clear product information, and avoid greenwashing.

Following the publication and launch event, we presented our findings and policy recommendations at several online events in Europe and Asia, and our work was quoted in both media articles and policy reports, pushing for high ambition for key policy developments planned for March 2022.

Macroproblem with defining microplastics

Plastic producers often use definitions and vocabulary set in standards to push their vision in binding regulation. In the case of microplastics, this has become a truly pressing problem in European standardisation: definitions are being sliced into small area-specific pieces. Where we strive for a robust assessment methodology, companies often coin confusing and pointless terms which do nothing more but dilute the positive change.

It sounds simple enough: microplastics are pieces of plastic smaller than 5 mm. We need the international community to buy into the existing jurisprudence on microplastics, however – this is the only way we can aggregate data which will give us a full picture of the ‘macro’ problem that microplastics have become. Creating new terms to define them might hinder strong political action so much needed to tackle this important source of pollution once and for all.

The reality is far from the best-case scenario. Both European and international standardisers, working on a variety of standards for sectors including textiles or plastics, keep coming up with new designations such as ‘large microplastic’, ‘nanoplastic’ or ‘mesoplastic’.

The latter was a 2021 potential addition to plastic vocabulary, which would have excluded plastic particles sized 1 – 5mm from being counted as microplastic. An easy enough solution to dramatically reduce microplastic pollution… on paper. Our interventions in CEN/TC 249 on ‘Plastics’ allowed us to identify and avert these outrageous loopholes. Call a spade a spade! And microplastic microplastic.

Less wishful thinking, more compost – thanks to real-life conditions testing

In home composting, organic materials are piled up in order to form a compost heap, where they naturally decompose. This technique is mostly applied to organic waste, such as fruit and vegetable peelings, but it can also be used in other applications, such as selected types of plastic packaging.

In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of “compostable” labels on plastic products but, as our 2021 report clearly shows, green claims can often be very deceptive. In fact, a recent experiment revealed that 69% of the ‘OK Compost Home’ labelled materials do not disintegrate sufficiently!

Who defines the requirements a product must meet to be labelled as compostable then? As often is the case, the devil lies in the detail, and in this case, the detail is laid out in a standard.

In 2021, as part of the CEN Technical Committee 261 on ‘Packaging degradability’ we worked hard to ensure the revision of two European standards on home composting (EN 17427 and EN 17428). Thanks to our expert contributions, the standards now better reflect real-life conditions.

What does it mean in practice? We convinced the standard-makers to lower the temperature of the disintegration test, which is the ‘reality check’ for composting, from 25°C +/- 5°C to 20°C +/- 5°C.  Compost is usually made outdoors, so a lower and more realistic temperature in the testing phase will raise the bar for plastic producers wishing to certify their products as ‘compostable’ and will inevitably bring us closer to making home composting for plastic a reality.

Thanks to our work, home composting labels will be more credible. Less wishful thinking, more compost. Simple as that!