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What the UN's quest for a global plastic treaty means for circularity
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Anthony, Alina, and Mike first hop over the pond to the UK to discuss the new mass balance laws, and what they might mean for the future of recycling in the UK, along with Cadbury's somewhat bungling attempt to explain the concept of mass balance to the broader public. Then, they turn to the ongoing negotiations for a global plastic treaty in Busan South Korea. Times have changed since the UN's efforts started - is there still hope for global agreement?
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Innovation Matters'
00:00:07
Speaker
peanut butter pie. Have these machines. It's a big hopper full of peanuts. you hello Hello and welcome to Innovation Matters. The podcast about sustainable innovation, brought to you by Lux Research. I'm your host, Anthony Scavo. I'm joined by my two colleagues, Alina and Mike Coleman.
Peanut Grinder Mishap Story
00:00:23
Speaker
Mike, you're telling me the most ridiculously bougie New York thing in the world right now.
00:00:28
Speaker
And it was kind of like what I felt if it was in 2024. I'm imagining here. But just break this down for for me right now for the people of the land. You were doing what this morning? I stopped at Whole Foods on the way there's one near our office. I often stop there on the way you know to or from work ah because the grocery stores in my neighborhood all suck.
00:00:51
Speaker
um But they have like these peanut grinders there. like There's these machines with peanuts in them and you press a button and it grinds them into peanut butter and you put a little container under it and you know take as much as you want. It's just like the self-serve kind of thing, as they have in many grocery stores. But they have one that has honey roasted peanuts in it. so okay Nice. I've never seen this, by the way. Never seen this, yeah. But he doesnate spoke but what what happened? You spilled the peanut butter everywhere?
00:01:18
Speaker
Well, then I put the stuff like in a bag to take it to the office and the the pe of it's not in a jar, right? It's in like a plastic container, takeout type container with a lid. So I put it in there and it.
00:01:30
Speaker
that that thing somehow popped open in the bag and peanut butter spilled inside the bag. and So I was, I was cleaning that up. as you were straight to the podcast recording oh do That's one way to, to ensure consumers that it's like pure ingredient.
00:01:50
Speaker
There's no additive there. That's like, maybe you see like a lot of grocery stores will have that for coffee beans, right? You could take cold coffee beans. Sure. Yeah. Same sort of thing. I've done that myself for coffee beans. In Europe i rocked up in europe it is very common to to have your own orange juice, like to press your own orange juice. Like there's like these machines with lots of oranges and you just make your own juice. See, I'm i'm i'm i'm continental.
00:02:21
Speaker
Incredible.
UK Plastic Tax and Recycling Challenges
00:02:22
Speaker
ah Speaking of the continent of of Europe, today we are wanting to be talking about Plastics and particularly plastic taxes and Mass balance and stuff like that. I also wanted to mention the UN n Treaty on plastic waste which is about to get underway or I rather I should say about to get sort of ah the fifth Intergovernmental and negotiating committee meeting of the plastic Treaty is is about to get underway and in Busan, South Korea, that will be starting in just, I think, three days from the time of recording here. At least the enter the initial work will be starting there. um But yeah, we wanted to start with the the plastic tacks and, I believe, the related mass balance announcement in the UK. So a couple things to to call out here.
00:03:25
Speaker
um Big picture, right? The idea is that it's a plastic packaging tax. um The basic idea is that the you know you need to have a certain amount of material in your packaging.
00:03:42
Speaker
If you don't, you will pay a fine you know per that amount. That's typically how these plastic packs works. What's interesting is that um they have allowed mass balancing to count as recycled content.
00:03:59
Speaker
what's Very interesting is that they're using a pretty specific type of mass balancing. So again, mass balancing is an accounting method. So when you take plastic and you put it into something like plastic pyrolysis, you don't get out recycled plastic, instead you get out oil. And then you can use that oil to make new plastics.
00:04:17
Speaker
You have to account for both the volume, just physically tracking the material. You have to be able to like make a claim and back it up with paperwork. That's part of mass balance. But then you also have to account for the yield, the differences in yield between the different steps of the process, and actually make a claim as to how much material you're getting out. The UK is allowed for a fuels-exempt mass balance.
00:04:42
Speaker
so any mass that goes into fuels, you can't essentially move around for the purposes of your mass balancing. um Over a balancing period of three months, so basically you take the average amount of recycled content you've used over three months and at a site level. So you only can basically you know consider a single site. So if you had three recycling sites in the UK, you couldn't average the
00:05:20
Speaker
the level of recycled content across all three sites, although you could average it across three months for each individual site. And there's no transfer of recycled feedstock credits. So if you buy some of these credits or you do some of this recycling, you can't sell that content to someone else.
00:05:41
Speaker
um on paper only and have them sell 100% primary plastics with a paper claim over cycling, you actually have to have, as far as I understand, this the actual content in in the material that you're selling in the package.
00:05:57
Speaker
um So it's a pretty it's a pretty interesting implementation. I think, honestly, it's a pretty good implementation in the sense that ah it does allow obviously some mass balancing, which is useful for plastic pyrolysis. It doesn't allow full free allocation mass balancing.
00:06:18
Speaker
um which I think is good because this means that the claims about the level of content in the package are gonna be closer to the actual physical reality. There's gonna be a better match there, but it does allow this overtime averaging, which I think is actually really valuable um because that is going to just give the producers more flexibility to run their systems in a way that makes sense, you know,
00:06:48
Speaker
as waste production and consumption fluctuates, this will give them some some nice flexibility there. But yeah, i'll I'll share, I guess that's kind of my thinking, but I have certainly more to say. but Yeah, I mean,
Consumer Understanding of Recycled Packaging
00:07:04
Speaker
I'm curious. this's This is a lot of momentum for paralysis and for mass balancing, right? I mean, it's it's already been favorite.
00:07:13
Speaker
yeah More momentum for mass balancing, right? Certainly in Europe. Certainly in Europe, some in the US, but it's- There's been some proposed stuff in the US, but plastic pyrolysis itself has not had a great year. And plastic pyrolysis in the UK is actually really, really challenging. So it's not obvious to me that this will spur the development of chemical recycling in the UK itself.
00:07:40
Speaker
A big part of that is that plastic pyrolysis generally takes in natural gas as an energy feedstock and produces an oil-like product. So the UK, where the price of natural gas has been really high and really volatile over the last two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and beyond, um because they haven't been making... The UK has not made a lot of good investments in like natural gas infrastructure and stuff like that.
00:08:09
Speaker
um you are basically, you know you're triaging or your you you know you're taking a sort of two comparative prices between something that's expensive and something that's cheap, right? You're burning an expensive fuel to make a relatively cheaper fuel. um And that was one of the challenges we saw with something like, there was a UK company whose name I'm blanking on, because it was very, very generic. It was called like Advanced Recycling or something. um But they ultimately shut down. Right, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
00:08:38
Speaker
you know, they shut down in 2022 and a big part of it was just like the structural environment was was challenging. um So yeah, there's been this legislative momentum for mass balance, but we need to see in 2025 if that really results in like on time completion and scale up and ramp up of actual production, which is still I think lagging behind pretty substantially what we forecast and even further behind what the industry expected because our forecast was pretty conservative relative to industry.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, though I think at the at a baseline in the in the longer run, if if mass balances accepted more places, that's going to be more favorable for these paralysis approaches, ah even if they are maybe scuffling a bit right right now.
00:09:27
Speaker
you know, just because it's going to create the demand for the product is still going to be necessary, I think, to to move. I mean, as we've we've been saying for a long time, it's still going to be necessary to move to some of these, um you know, other more sort of next generation approaches that that operate at lower temperatures, use lower energy um for that for paralysis to be to be really viable overall. But I think it's also about a question to me of like whether even those advanced technologies would have would have a good shot if there isn't the ability to use to use mass balancing to create demand for for those types of recycled materials. And that seems like that the latter question, anyway, seems like it's it's trending towards being being resolved and in favor of mass balance, at least some flavor thereof.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's this is better than the alternative, for sure, right oh for for
Challenges in Plastic Pyrolysis
00:10:26
Speaker
pyrolysis. This is you know much more aligned with the better outcomes. um And I think you know fuel exempt mass balance with a fee, you know a charge to help incentivize that recycling, that recycled content is is a pretty good situation for um you know for these pyrolysis flares. I still think the biggest barrier though to plastic pyrolysis is really on the waste availability side. And this does not directly address that, right? um It creates this sort of downstream incentive and you know an ability for them to pay more right ah for waste, but it doesn't necessarily create
00:11:16
Speaker
the actual collection of waste, right? Like you still need that effort to be, and the separation, right? And a lot of those, um
00:11:27
Speaker
bottlenecks are not necessarily due to the price per se that people are willing to pay for the waste. It's often an issue of of capital investment. For a lot of companies, it's so it's an issue of space. like they don't have If you're a waste collector, you don't necessarily have the space to sort and separate all these pyrolysis ready feed stocks. And it's a question of volume. right You need to get a pretty large amount of volume together in one place. So it's good, obviously. but you know direct investment into the the collection, the waste collection and waste sorting is is I think also necessary. And that to me is the part that's still that's still kind of missing.
UN Plastics Treaty and Lobbying Impact
00:12:10
Speaker
Well, then I think the the other part that's potentially still you know up in the air, even if if regulators maybe at least in some regions are coming around on mass balance, is is the consumer acceptance of this.
00:12:24
Speaker
And that's one of the other stories that that I thought was was kind of interesting. that Speaking of the UK, Cadbury, um ah now owned by Mondelez, but sort of iconic British chocolate candy maker, have started offering ah plastic or you know products in in plastic wrapping that is 80% recycled plastic. but 80% according to math balance, right? Because these are basically I assume polyethylene films, right? So they're they're made from, ah you know, ah very difficult to make those thin films out of mechanically recycled polyethylene. But obviously the paralysis process where you're going back to that, you know, to that feedstock, you can get the essentially virgin quality materials out of
00:13:22
Speaker
out of it, that's one of the great benefits of it. um So it's it's it's a data point in favor of of adoption, but I thought it was also kind of interesting in that they were, ah they and and specifically Amcor, the the packaging company that that's making this packaging for them, their Amfinity um recycled material, it's called. They were sort of touting this as like, oh, this is great because it's, you know,
00:13:49
Speaker
buying our product, but also because they've come up with this very consumer-friendly way of positioning it to their consumers and explaining sort of what mass balance is, which I think has always been one of the challenges because you try to get it, explain it, and just sue an average person.
00:14:08
Speaker
It kind of sounds like BS. It's difficult to explain it to experts, let alone. Right. Yeah. I mean, I have enough trouble kind of following the difference between like ah free attribution and fuel exempt and exactly at what all these had different terms of flavors mean. Have you seen this consumer friendly explanation? I did. I think i have. Yeah. like i was I was curious for Alina's take on it. I posted it yeah in our in our Innovation Matters Slack.
00:14:36
Speaker
I did and I had to read it and like I had to see the video like three times to wrap my hand around ka yeah i mean it. is It is digestible, but I don't know if it really speaks to the mainstream consumer. I would just say that I mean, even fancy terms like mass balance and pyrolysis like might make people's eyes gaze over or like if they don't get it, they'll just tune out or they might assume it's a gimmick. So I i would i would go for like something more relatable, right? Like if I were to explain this in very simple terms,
00:15:19
Speaker
ah just like start with like imagine a ah bakery that's making bread and traditionally that bakery is using flour that comes from wheat grow um from one we'd grown on conventional farms but now they've decided to move to to use some flour from organic farms which is better for the environment so instead of setting up a separate production line just for organic bread which would cost a lot and take time they mix the organic flour with the conventional flour in the same batch of bread and over time they increase the amount of organic flour in the mix so I would make analogies like that right so similarly in industries like
00:16:03
Speaker
plastics, chemicals, packaging. Mass balance means introducing renewable or recycled materials into into the production process alongside traditional ones. So the company keeps track of how much of the sustainable material is used and ensures that the same amount is attributed to the final product. right it' like Think of it as an ah an accounting system for sustainability.
00:16:31
Speaker
And the key idea is transitioning step by step towards a more sustainable future. So it's not 100% sustainable right away, but every small step helps reduce the use of less eco-friendly resources over time.
00:16:47
Speaker
right and and basically like mass balance supports progress while using existing technologies and existing factories and making easier for companies to transition and eventually scale up their efforts. I mean, this is this is how i I try to explain it to myself, right? Just to wrap my head around it. Yeah. and i But I think also for consumers, it's very, very important to um to also make it tangible like use real numbers and examples like for example switching to this packaging will cut down I don't know five tons of plastic waste every year or this package uses 50 less carbon than regular plastic right like seeing this benefit makes it real right it might also counter some um
00:17:39
Speaker
um accusation of greenwashing, right um by by have by yeah by putting a real number around it, and also by admitting that ah this isn't perfect yet, it but it's a big step in the right direction. right where We're working on magicic on on making it even better. Another thing that I think it would be interesting for the consumer perspective,
00:18:05
Speaker
ah like answering questions that are practical questions for consumers. Like, ah does this mean that I should recycle differently? Or like, why is this ah how is this different from using 100% recycled material? Isn't 100% recycled material better? Why mass balance, right? And then if we go with my mass balance, what does it mean for the way I recycle?
00:18:29
Speaker
right Or what does this mean for the quality of the packaging? Is is it going to work as well as regular regular packaging? Or will this technology make products more expensive? So these type of questions are very relevant for the consumer. And it would be really interesting to, I think Brandt should try to answer this question is just to ah to speak the consumer language.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny because like this consumer friendly thing that they're like, they say they've got, it's still not really that consumer friendly. And to your point, it doesn't really address why they're doing this. And I think that's such a big picture there. and Yeah. Like their actual explanation is still using a lot of like, yeah a lot of like very like technical terms and like bookkeeping and all this stuff where it's like,
00:19:28
Speaker
Is this really this this really it, brother? Like, come on. Yeah, I'm not really sure the explanation is is that. I mean, it's it's it's a clear explanation. I mean, I get it. I'm not i'm not really sure it's it's that much more you know kind of convincing to the average consumer, though I guess I'm also not entirely sure that matters because I'm just looking at the packaging for these bars. It just has a big badge on it that says 80 percent recycled plastic um and recycle me again.
00:19:58
Speaker
ah which is ah another thing they're also trying to you know to get people to actually recycle the thin film packaging, which of course but most people don't because it doesn't go into the curbside you know or or single stream recycling bins.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. and I'm not even sure that a a coded package like this would pass something like, uh, Americans or, you know, and the association of plastic recyclers, APRs, uh, recyclability guidelines. Like it doesn't look like it would pass those guidelines, uh, for thin film packaging. Right. And, um, thin film packaging recycling is really expensive. Like if you were actually to do curbside collection here of this, ah yeah be it would it would be insanely expensive. So like.
00:20:41
Speaker
I mean, this is greenwashing, right? I mean, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, is it greenwashing is kind of an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, the fact that it just says 80 percent recycled on the front of it, like yeah that's all most consumers are ever going to see or even think about. Right. To the extent they think about it at all. um So I'm not sure that it, you know,
00:21:09
Speaker
how how successful or not they are at explaining the minutiae of mass balance on their on their website. It probably doesn't matter to more than a very small number of people. But but um if they're not going to get called out by the government and the for this as greenwashing because it it meets the government's definition, that's definitely a bonus. um you know Whether or not activist groups who i'm I'm sure are probably not super fans of this, you know the green pieces and things of of of the world, I'm sure it would make a lot of the you know, the criticisms that we've referred to here, yeah how successful they might be at making a stink out of it or or for causing any reputational damage for that, that greenwashing is, you know, who knows, but what I don't think the explanation of mass balances is is making that big of a difference one way or the other and in that question.
Consumer Trust and Brand Transparency in Sustainability
00:22:06
Speaker
I think what's interesting about this is that, just based on my understanding of what Cadbury claims, because they link the ISCC Plus video here, this 80% content target or 80% content claim would not hold up actually under the new UK rules, Cadbury's UK company, this is the UK doing mass balancing, but that 80% number, presumably if they're using baseline ISCC, then that's a total free attribution, not fuel exempt. If they're going to market this in the UK, they're probably going to have to reduce that number under the new under the new regulatory system going forward. So it's just interesting to see you know that yeah like these these government regulations really do have some level of impact in terms of actually changing what the claims that our people are making and the relative ah value of those claims.
00:23:06
Speaker
um But yeah, speaking of companies like Cadbury's, I wanted to highlight, or maybe switch gears a little bit and just touch on the you the UN.
00:23:17
Speaker
um So for those of you who don't know, our listeners, ah in 2022, the UN agreed, they did a, the UN environmental program, signed a binding resolution to create basically a new set of international agreements on plastic waste. And importantly, this mandate covered the entire lifecycle of plastics. So the production of plastics, the the use of plastics, the design of things like plastic packaging, and then of course plastics at the end of life with a particular focus on plastics in the environment, plastics in the water, microplastics, all that stuff. And since then they have been, they have had four meetings, they've been drafting up this binding
00:24:11
Speaker
document that everyone is supposed to be signing. And just a few days from now, they will meet in Busan, South Korea. And importantly, this is the supposedly the final meeting. The deadline for ratification is 2024.
00:24:30
Speaker
this is the last meeting they're supposed to walk out of this meeting with a ratified document, which doesn't necessarily mean it comes into effect immediately. um I think even if they ratified a document a week from now, which would be pretty exceptional, it would take about two years. they would They would then go into a series of committees and meetings on implementation. So it's not like this would just become law, the law of the land, you know, in a week, right? Even in the the most aggressive case.
00:25:00
Speaker
But it's been very challenging. It's been very contentious. ah Particularly contentious has been the idea. a lot of companies or excuse me A lot of countries are pushing for limits on plastic production, caps on plastic production, ah similar to the the proposed caps in carbon emissions from the Paris Agreement. That is very
00:25:25
Speaker
challenging. ah People don't like it, especially oil and gas companies, right? But what's interesting is that there is the business alliance for a plastics treaty. This is one of the many lobbying groups that has sprung up around this. And it's mostly CPG companies.
00:25:45
Speaker
They actually recently signed the Road to Busan Declaration, excuse me, the Bridge to Busan Declaration. And that's the declaration that essentially does support caps on plastics, right? um Or at least reaffirms that caps on plastics are in scope for the treaty and that's something that should be considered and, you know, they want an aggressive treaty.
00:26:05
Speaker
so I just I bring all this up because I was curious. I mean, there's there's two high level things. One is that a lot of the sustainability regulation is basically just about who has to bear the economic pain of the transition, right? Because you can imagine a sustainability transition where recycled packaging just gets a lot more expensive and, you know, CPG companies are forced to bear that extra cost, right?
00:26:40
Speaker
um and you know maybe pass along to consumers, but um maybe not, and there's some margin compression there. you know there's it's It's challenging for them. right Or you can imagine a future where the economic pain is mostly pushed onto the plastics producers right in the form of reduced demand for plastics, right um either through caps or through other you know switching and other various other mechanisms. And so there's this big question of like where does the economic pain get born?
00:27:09
Speaker
ultimately it flows down to the consumer, but as it makes its way to the consumer, it can take pretty different paths with pretty different effects, right? um these are not you know It's not necessarily just all awash. So that's one thing I guess I would say. and The second thing I would say is um and I think there's a lot of animosity or popular consumer sentiment to the idea of corporate lobbying, but obviously the corporate lobbying is not necessarily opposed. you know We think of it as you know oil like ask evil Oil and gas companies on one side and like the good right-minded NGOs or governments on the other side. It's a little more complicated than that. Alina, what's your reaction to all this? and Especially in the corporate lobbying side, I'm curious as to how people think about it. but um yeah how How are you thinking about these issues and and plastic sustainability going forward?
00:28:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've seen over and over again that consumers are wary of a corporation passing down the cost on of sustainability on their backs. um And um I mean, I wouldn't be surprised even with mass balance, right? Like the that cost would be transferred to and to consumers. But and because of that, ah we see any, I mean,
00:28:29
Speaker
I know that by this time, it's it's becoming kind of like a cliche to say, but the the polarization that we're seeing in amongst American consumers is a reflection of that. It's a reflection of their distrust in the system, where lobbyists, where corporations are perceived to be um in cahoot, so to say, um with government regulators, right? and where the the victim but where consumers see themselves as the victims of this system. right And this is why we're also seeing well to Trump's so recent nomination for Robert Kennedy Jr., ah so so for his but nomination, who is like a left-leaning environmental lawyer, but his nomination basically reflects that
00:29:23
Speaker
Trump's recognizing that Kennedy can tap into into this consumer frustration that cuts across the political lines, right? um it It's a reflection that the American consumers are fed up. um They're tired of feeling like um everything is a commodity, like their health is a commodity um that's being traded between corporations and regulators, right?
00:29:51
Speaker
um And by by nominating him, it is um it is a way to to tap into all these fears, right? To um give a megaphone to the to consumers, both on the left and on the right.
00:30:10
Speaker
and but and ah give a voice for their widespread belief that big food, big pharma, government corporate government regulators are all too cozy for comfort.
00:30:26
Speaker
right so that's um that's how I would see it. I mean, i mean going back to ah RFK, like his platform, ah ah aside from from his conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination, his platform does resonate with consumers, right? Supermarkets are full of unhealthy processed foods, rising obesity rates, um nobody seems to be caring about, nobody seems to be solving,
00:30:53
Speaker
ah drug prices are high and ah frankly they feel exploitative. So this isn't just a political theater, it's really hitting a nerve with consumer and it feels personal. And this this goes along with ah what we talked about, consumers feeling that they have to bear the cost for the transition towards sustainability, they have to pay the cost for whatever.
00:31:15
Speaker
even like for one of the greenwashing tactics that brands are putting. So when somebody like Kennedy says that the system is rigged, consumers nod and say, well, somebody somebody gets it, finally. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's it's it's a big part of, I guess, my current frustration with the Democrats is that they they've kind of seeded a lot of ground on this to people like RFK where it's like the only people who are seen as credibly opposing or credibly offering a solution to some of these real challenges are you know least total total cranks like RFK who
00:31:56
Speaker
you know, want to do take fluoride out of of the water and yeah or dr oz right ban vaccines. dr oz It kind of shows how far like how far from credibility the the Democrats have fallen and on a lot of these issues, right?
00:32:12
Speaker
ah healthcare care being a big one, right? And everything's sort of the constellation of the issues related to healthcare, right? And that's where you, you know, you create the opportunity for like a lot of this like seed oil stuff or whatever it is to to sort of enter the public consciousness. And that just ended the public consciousness, but now apparently set policy. um And I worry that you're going to end up seeing something similar with recycling where, um you know,
00:32:40
Speaker
if you have this, oh, big oil and it just wants to make more plastic. And, you know, if you drink out of a plastic water bottle, the micro plastics, you know, immediately enter your bloodstream and like.
00:32:54
Speaker
you know, cause a bunch of diseases and the Democrats are just, you know, they're just a corporate public, you know, party. They're just in the pocket of big oil. And so we need to like listen to a guy like RFK who's going to ban all plastics or whatever. Right. Like he's very anti-chemical. You know what I mean? RFK. And I don't think it's like likely right now, but, you know, we need effective public policy to actually make progress on recycling and I can very much imagine, you know, this next Trump government passing a law that has a lot of negative implications, ah not just for, you know, they could like ban useful types of plastics, like plastic water bottles. They could ban, they could cause everyone to switch to paper and like do a bunch of deforestation and increase carbon footprint. There's like a bunch of like bad but potential outcomes here, right? um Because we've sort of allowed
00:33:51
Speaker
a lot of cranks to empty government for a bunch of different long-term and complicated reasons. But you know that's ultimately where we're at. And it's it's tough to see. I also believe that this represents an opportunity for brands to double down on transparency. right I mean, we're seeing consumers really, really done with vague claims, with half-truths. So I think brands that are in food, in pharma, in agriculture,
00:34:22
Speaker
they they need to like literally show their receipts. like Whether it's about cleaning the ingredient labels, whether it's about price breakdowns, transparency in the supply chain, in the production methods, um they have to they have to show their receipts. And they have to speak the consumer language. right they They need to ah not be afraid to name names and call out issues.
00:34:46
Speaker
ah like for example, address consumer concern head on. Like if consumers are worried about preservatives, talk about what you're doing to reduce them. If they're frustrated with drug prices, highlight any affordability initiatives, right? That is like the keys to to show that they're listening and that they're acting on.
00:35:08
Speaker
on what consumers want. That's that's what's going to make them feel seen. and yeah i mean I think this is a signal of an opportunity for CPG firms and also for ah chemical firms and ingredient suppliers. i mean it's It's obviously already a trend to be looking at clean label ah right and and and providing and using ingredients that that don't ah that that are more natural or have these.
00:35:32
Speaker
um you know that don't require you to put those chemical sounding names on on on the label, literally. um you know so But I think this is this is a reflection of the fact that this is, you know obviously this wasn't like the biggest deal in the election. It's not like why Trump won or whatever, but I do think it it reflects a real you know a sense of like, this is a consumer sentiment that's out there that people feel like is is is not being ah not being addressed. And I think it's definitely something that you know innovation teams at CPG firms and at the you know ingredient suppliers and things should should be really thinking about and and and redoubling efforts on.
00:36:12
Speaker
and
00:36:16
Speaker
you know Even if, whether or not the Department of Health and Human Services is actually going to end up forcing them to you know stop using FD&C red dye number 40 or whatever. like I just don't know if they can really make that happen.
00:36:31
Speaker
like i I struggle with the idea that this will lead to positive outcomes or that there's even a potential for positive outcomes. Well, I have positive outcomes. I think that's the way to think about strategically responding to it, is to look into these sort of clean label efforts, which companies certainly are already.
00:36:55
Speaker
um and yeah it's It's something that the consumers, I think, clearly want to see more of. Absolutely. That is true. All right. If you liked this podcast, what's wrong with you? Um, but luckily you can like and subscribe.
00:37:17
Speaker
You can give us a rating, five stars. It does help us out. And you can check out all of our stuff, all of our great other content on the blog. um You can check out all of our great content at www.luxresearchinc.com. Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm.
00:37:41
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You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc dot.com slash blog for all of the latest news, opinions, and articles. so