In June 2008, Tiger Brands announced that it had gone green in a big way – a month earlier it had begun packing its Albany bread into biodegradable plastic bags which would disintegrate fully within a year to 18 months.
At the time, Albany was distributing more than 500 million plastic bags every year, and hailed the move as a “significant” boon for the environment.
The biodegradable bags cost half a cent more than the non-biodegradable ones – 1.5c versus 1c – a cost which was absorbed by Albany.
The move was at odds with the country’s burgeoning plastics recycling industry, which aims to get as much discarded plastic out of the environment and into recycling plants to be-used, rather than having the bags lie around as litter or clogging landfills for more than a year before supposedly breaking down.
To make matters worse, biodegradable plastic has an additive it in which makes it unsuitable for recycling, but there was no indication of this on the bag.
Last April, Tiger Brands successfully argued against a complaint lodged with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that Albany’s “biodegradable bag” claim was misleading, and thus the biodegradable logo stayed.
But earlier this year, a Mr Buldeo lodged a fresh complaint against that packaging claim, saying that he’d investigated the matter and discovered that while the actual bag might be biodegradable, the inks printed onto it were not.
Responding, Tiger Brands argued that it was accepted internationally that the mass of ink present on most packaging was so small that it didn’t interfere with process of the bag biodegrading.
The ASA Directorate upheld Baldeo’s complaint, saying that Tiger Brands hadn’t produced any independent verification of its bags’ biodegradability.
And while the ink content may be relatively negligible, it said, the biodegradable claim would be assumed to apply to the entire product.
Tiger Brands was given until mid-June to remove the biodegradable claim – with its twig and leaf logo – from its Albany bread bags, which it did.
But something occurred to me when I was sorting my recyclable waste the other day: is the bag still biodegradable – just not marketed as such, because of the ASA ruling – or are the bags no longer biodegradable?
So I put this to Tiger Brands’ corporate sustainability executive, Bongiwe Njobe.
And guess what – the bag is no longer biodegradable.
“The challenge we faced was that recyclers of other plastic could not include the biodegradable bag in their process,” Njobe said.
“We considered various options and decided to remove the agent in order to enable recycling.
“We remain committed to finding lasting and sustainable solutions to packaging.”
And given that the company is now saving half a cent on those hundreds of millions of bread bags by dropping the additive which made them biodegradable, they’ve now certainly got quite a few million rand to devote to alternative green objectives.
And now all those millions of Albany bags can be recycled.
Do your bit!