Last week in Low Carbon Commerce - 2023-10-9

Last Week in Low Carbon Commerce
October 9, 2023

Regulation, Research, and Top Trends

📦 The Washington Post published a piece on plastic packaging waste and the growth of concentrated health and beauty products, with many plastic- and water-free alternatives (such as SustainBar shampoo bars and unPaste toothpaste tablets) now on the market and expanding from zero waste retailers like Fillgood to mass chains like Walmart and Target.

🌱 170 major food companies including Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, Bayer, Danone, and Arla Foods collaborated to release a global framework for how businesses should transition to regenerative agriculture. The framework, entitled ‘Regenerating Together’, was released by SAI Platform, a non-profit network of food & drink companies driving sustainable agriculture initiatives.

🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), a global fashion multi-stakeholder alliance, launched the Manufacturer Climate Action Program (MCAP). The MCAP represents a partnership with industry leaders such as Nike and Target to find scalable solutions to climate change, and will be an integral part of the SAC’s Decarbonization Program.

🧻 The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) issued The Issue with Tissue Fifth Edition report and scorecard. Whole Foods Market, Green Forest, Natural Value, and Trader Joe's all earned A+s, while Procter & Gamble (P&G) was “the only one of the three largest U.S. toilet paper producers to earn F grades for its tissue brands across all five editions of NRDC’s scorecard.” The scorecard looks at 145 brands. Notably, of the 29 toilet paper brands that receive A or B grades, half were launched within the past five years, including new private labels like Target’s Everspring brand.

📄 On October 1, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) entered its transitional phase, during which it will only apply to imports of cement, iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen; EU importers of these goods will have to report on the volume of their imports and the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions embedded during their production. CBAM is the EU's tool to fight carbon leakage as a feature of the Fit for 55 Agenda and aims to equalize the price of carbon between domestic products and imports.

🏷️ A study on Circular Strategies from Trove (branded resale specialists) and Worldly (apparel industry intelligence) concluded that circular strategies can help fashion brands grow while reducing carbon emissions, with resale being a meaningful decarbonization strategy.

🏷️ Sustainability intelligence provider HowGood partnered with electronic shelf label (ESL) maker SES-imagotag to trial electronic shelf labels displaying product sustainability attributes at a retail store in London. The store measured an average sales increase of 25.8% across all products labeled with HowGood attributes. The most significant increase in sales came from products labeled with “Fair Labor”, with sales increasing an average of 45.1%.

📦 Research from Closed Loop Partners on molecular recycling technologies (also called advanced recycling or chemical recycling) found that molecular recycling can expand the scope of plastic waste we can recycle: conversion technologies could accept 82% of all plastic packaging produced – more than mechanical, purification, or depolymerization technologies could alone.

Retail

📦 Amazon is expanding its Ships in Product Packaging program (formerly known as Ship in Own Container) to be available to all sellers who use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) by 2024, helping reduce Amazon-added delivery packaging; in 2022, Amazon shipped 11% of global items without added Amazon packaging.

Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart Chief Sustainability Officer & EVP, spoke at the 2023 Goldman Sachs Global Sustainability Forum, highlighting progress and challenges with the company’s climate and other ESG initiatives.

🌱 Meijer has diverted 10M pounds of potential food waste through the Flashfood app, which offers users and customers steep discounts on groceries nearing their sell-by dates. Flashfood started as a pilot program in the Detroit metro area in 2019 and expanded to all Meijer-owned stores in 2021 after the pilot stores were able to cut in-store food waste by 10%.

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Brands

📄 Last week JM Smucker released their 2023 Corporate Impact Report and highlighted a 93% reduction in GHG emissions compared to their 2019 baseline.

🌱 Hormel Foods has committed to reduce its absolute GHG emissions from its operations by 50% by 2030 from a 2019 baseline. It has also committed to reducing absolute GHG emissions within its supply chain by 27.5% within the same timeframe, in line with the trajectory established during the Paris Climate Agreement.

Deals and funding

💰 Cove, a California-based company providing PHA biomaterials and biodegradable packaging using proprietary AI development tools and packaging technologies, raised an undisclosed amount in its latest round of funding.

💰 Grocery platform Invafresh (specializing in the demand forecasting of fresh groceries) has acquired Whywaste (specializing in similar tools that decrease food waste and increase profitability for stores). Invafresh will now offer advanced date checking, markdown price optimization, and donation management capabilities.

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