This blog was originally published by Pure on their website on 04/07/2019
As a Belu partner, Pure have kindly given us permission to publish their thoughtful piece here on our site. The below is written in their words.
Last year, we published the article below on our website. As the questions about single-use plastic continues to grow, we have updated the article and wanted to share some more details with you. It is quite long as, unfortunately, in this debate there are no simple answers.
Being a sustainable business is hard. It is particularly hard for a business like ours where 98% of our food is taken away, so it needs packaging. Speed of service and convenience are key reasons for people shopping at Pure. We have to make food in advance for it to be ready for our customers (which creates food waste when we don’t get our planning right!). And balancing convenience for our customers with our responsibility to the environment is a huge challenge. We have worked very hard to make ourselves as sustainable as possible. The details of some of what we do can be found here.
But we get a lot of criticism for using plastic in our business, so we wanted to explain our reasons in more detail. We know we are on the wrong side of this debate in terms of public perception (we are not only against Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but Sir David Attenborough!). We don’t pretend to know more about the environment than they do. But we also don’t want to pretend to do something which, we know from the information available, is not actually the solution.
We could change our packaging to be compostable to make ourselves look better. But we are more interested in doing the right thing than what is perceived to be the right thing. We believe in compostable packaging in the long-term. But, at the moment, if a company is using compostable packaging without the ability to have it collected and processed – and claiming it is more environmentally friendly – they are being disingenuous.
But the type of packaging is only one part of this process. Like most companies, we have a three-stage approach to managing our impact on the environment:
- Reduce
- Reuse
- Recycle