According to Defra, each year over 10m tonnes of packaging are placed on the UK market, with about half ending up in households.
It has developed: Infinite kitchen work tops from 100% waste sourced from stores and end-of-life DIY products Carryapac, a reusable packaging system for kitchen products that is reducing damage five-fold, saving £1m and 2,500 tonnes of packaging Metisse Insulation – a "take back" scheme for customers' textile waste that turns it into insulation products.
The six-strong crew plans to track close but not through the infamous Pacific Trash Vortex, a vast patch of sea off Hawaii containing millions of tonnes of discarded plastic bottles, bags and packaging – an area said to be six times the size of the UK.
The Independent reported in February that scientists estimate that about eight million tonnes of plastic debris such as food packaging and plastic bottles are being washed into the oceans each year, and the cumulative quantity of waste will result in a tenfold increase by 2020.
When Gary Doonin, director of Doonin Plant Ltd, was branded Scotland's worst polluter and fined £200,000 for dumping hundreds of tonnes of waste, including car tyres, food packaging and clothing at a disused colliery, some may have had a sense of déjà vu.
The workload included dumping 10 tonnes of chocolate and clearing 500 tonnes of sodden biscuits, packaging and river silt that had accumulated in the factory.
Of the 57m tonnes of plastics produced in Europe annually, 39% is used in packaging.
When buying food conventionally rather than through a box scheme, the average family emits eight tonnes of carbon dioxide a year just from the production, processing, packaging and distribution of their food, compared with 4.4 tonnes from their car.
At the moment, flexible packaging, including plastic bags, frozen-food bags and pouches, makes up 556,000 tonnes of rubbish.
From those that produce things, the women ask for surplus produce or seconds: those 3.6 tonnes of pasta, which went to assorted soup kitchens in the greater Athens region, had marginally imperfect packaging.
For Finisterre, designing long-lasting apparel reduces both the volume of clothing that end up in landfill – approximately 350,000 tonnes of used clothing is disposed of in the UK every year – and the proliferation of single-use packaging.
