The guiding concept behind the French scheme is the idea that consumers can make better decisions if they are more informed. This is a concept that will be familiar to the UK packaging industry with front of pack labelling. The ultimate aim of course is that consumers will be able to compare competing products on their environmental impact to the same standards, and factor this information into making an informed purchasing decision.
Whilst compulsory implementation of the scheme in France is unlikely much before 2020, the scheme may at some point be matched by pan-European legislation and as such, potentially represents the first sign of a new more robust eco-labelling requirement across the European packaging industry.
The French scheme in question originates from France's Grenelle I and Grenelle II legislation. Grenelle I established the legal right for the consumer to have access to environmental information on the products that they buy. Grenelle II, the operational law, established how this aim would be put into practice.
As anyone familiar with the gold-standard of life-cycle assessment (LCA) will know, comparing competing products on their environmental impact is harder than it sounds. It's relatively straight-forward to establish the environmental impact of one product, but it's then incredibly difficult to make a direct comparison with a rival product.
In France, the government is attempting to get around this problem by establishing a national database – to facilitate data comparison and exchange, and working with industry to establish which criteria products can be measured against. The French scheme will in its final form potentially represent a "LCA-lite", enabling consumers to make direct comparisons to the same criteria and methodology.
The good news is that whilst the French scheme will go beyond ISO standards, in practice the scheme represents an "enhanced" version – built from a basis in ISO 14040 and 14044 respectively. Therefore, any organisation currently collating information on its environmental impact at the moment will be in a good place to start complying with the new French scheme.
To me, the eco-label scheme speaks more widely about the changing role of packaging in the global industry. Packaging remains one of the most important forms of marketing available. The strength of one good packaging design versus another is often the difference between a sale and being left on the shelf.
However, packaging is also increasingly required to be informative; educating consumers on its contents, nutritional values or in this case a product's overall environmental impact. Packaging is also an integral part of the final product; it has a major effect on a consumer's final experience of a product and through the choices made in materials – packaging has a major impact on a given product's environmental credentials.
As eco-labelling projects become more important we can expect two shifts within the packaging industry. The first shift is a renewed focus on design – how can we produce packaging designs that can simultaneously market to and objectively educate the consumer? The second shift is a focus on materials, what can we, as an industry, do to lessen our environmental impact? How can we increase the use of renewable materials such as paper and board and how can we increase recycling rates of all materials? These are the discussions that are already underway within our industry and why developments in eco-labelling are an issue to watch.
