So thank you very much. The most important thing to start with is that I have a Scandinavian name, and that causes huge confusion. So, just to make sure everybody's on the same page, I am from Iceland, the supermarket, and not Iceland, the country.
So, just so quickly. It's a massive privilege to be invited to talk to you today about, why we decided to become # too cool for plastic, which is the campaign. And to be in such great company as well with Cal and Claire, I, I'll try and make it as interesting as, Claire's flying turtles.
I'll do my best. But I'm gonna try to talk to you about plastic from a business perspective, and that has its own set of challenges and opportunities. And for those of you who don't know Iceland well at this point, particularly anybody international, You may well be imagining Vikings and volcanoes.
Worse from my perspective, and if you're in the UK, you may be imagining Kerry Katona and prawn rings. So hopefully, I can explain that it's a little bit different from that in 2019. We're a supermarket chain with 960 stores.
You'll find us on every UK high street. 80 of them are kind of Iceland's big sister stores, so they're called Food Warehouse. They tend to be on retail parks, and they've got a bigger range, and they have got a little bit of a difference in customer demographics.
So they're the ones with the Range Rovers parked outside, a bit like Costco. And we specialise in frozen food, hence the name Iceland. The business will be 50 years old next year, and it's still run by its founder, Malcolm, Sir Malcolm Walker, and I report to Malcolm's son, Richard, who is a managing director, and he is responsible for sustainability and corporate responsibility on the board.
Now, the company's privately owned, and that matters quite a lot because it gives us self-determination and it gives us agility. We don't have to report to corporate shareholders every quarter. That makes a huge difference in doing this kind of thing.
Sales, our sales. A bit over 3 billion pounds a year pounds, but that, that sounds a lot, but actually, we only have about 2% of the grocery market. So we're a small player, but we're small enough to act quickly, but hopefully big enough to make a difference, make a lot of noise.
My job is leading sustainability strategy. I've had the privilege of working all over the world and seeing economic, environmental damage in places like Kenya and Nepal, and South Africa and Bangladesh, and more recently in Borneo. But my history is much more of an activist and a corporate person, so it's very personal for me.
But equally, if you ask Richard Walker why he's leading the agenda, he'll tell you it's personal too. He's a dad of two small kids. He wants to do everything he can to ensure that this planet, when they grow up, is just amazing, you know, as it has been for all of us.
This quote is from Jane Goodall, which being that, I hope most of you, I'm sure most of you would recognise for her work with primates. But this is a quote that's painted, it's huge on the, on the, on the wall in my office behind my seat. And it's really, really important.
You know, we all have an impact on the world every single day. And let's not kid ourselves. You've heard from Callum and Claire, we're facing a huge, huge crisis.
The threat from climate change means we've got about 12 years left to change things. And if we don't do that, hundreds of millions of people are going to be affected by drought and floods and poverty. Our oceans are being poisoned.
There's microplastic in our bodies now, in our gut. There's microplastic, in human breast milk, potentially. And we are responsible for the mass extinction of species.
You know, we just heard about turtles, but extinction is running at 10,000 times the natural rate, and it is all down to one species, which is us, down to human beings and our lifestyles. We're now talking about devastating consequences in our own children's lifetimes. This isn't something in the far future.
And what's that got to do with business? Well, pretty much everything, whether you're a little veterinary practise, or a charity or a supermarket, we've all got a moral responsibility. We can be part of the problem, or we can be part of the change, and we've got to decide what differences, what kind of difference we're going to make.
So just before we talk plastics, I want to give you a bit of wider background on Iceland's culture and purpose, just to give you some context. What becomes very interesting when you talk about taking responsibility is this idea of of social innovation. By that, I mean people getting together to solve things, business people, public services, campaigners, consumers.
Our society is faced with a growing number of what academics call wicked problems, so they're the ones that seem unsolvable. And I've just put a few up here on the slide, which give you a flavour of the ones that matter to our customers and the 24,000 people who work for us. So as an example, child poverty is huge in the UK.
It's a topic, really, really important to us. 123,000 kids woke up on Christmas Day in the UK homeless. 4 million children are living below the poverty line.
So that their household income couldn't even give them a healthy diet. But what might shock you is that 3 million of those children have working parents. Now, that is also an environmental problem.
They are disconnected from nature. Cal mentioned the importance of wild places for people's health and happiness. 1.4 million children in the UK never even go to a park, let alone a wild space.
And that's huge because how can a child with no connection to nature become a caring steward for our planet to help us solve these problems in the future? We've also got a problem with social isolation. There's a million older people, often in the news, that feel very disconnected.
But research tells us it's 16 to 24 year olds are the worst affected. So again, picking up points that the other speakers have made, this social isolation actually stops people joining up and joining together to take action. So it's important in a lot of senses.
Like lots of supermarkets, we are really, really concerned with animal welfare, and I've put hand chickens on here because caged hands is the number one issue from the public in in my inbox. But there are many concerns about animal welfare. And that also spills now into animal welfare generally and wildlife and issues like the turtles, that have been mentioned today, because we're responsible, for buying fish from all over the world.
So ghost gear is important now to supermarkets. There's other important issues as well, like carbon reduction and food waste, and we know that bees are in crisis, you know, supermarkets import food from all over the world, but in some parts of China, children are hand pollinating plants because the bees have been killed by pesticides. We've got the Amazon rainforest being torn down to plant soy for animal feed and to breed cattle.
And then also there's two big issues for us at the moment, which are plastics and palm oil. So where we think business can make a difference in tackling these wicked problems is in three ways. It's all easier in a privately owned business.
First one is collaboration, often with unexpected partners. Innovation, because we've got permission to try new things, and disruption, and disruption is where we shake things up and we really try and change the status quo. We need a framework to do it.
We'll go live next month with a website that tells the story, hopefully really well. But Iceland, we don't have some huge complicated CSR strategy. We simply call it doing it right.
We've got a mission, which is providing families with great quality, affordable food, but we also have a purpose, and our purpose is To grow a profitable business so we can do the right thing for our people, but also the communities we serve and our planet. And it's not new. We've been a radical disrupt disruptor of the British food industry for many, many years.
We took our artificial colours and flavours in the 80s. We got serious about capturing and recycling CFCs. We pioneered green gases for refrigeration, we thought GM food.
So doing it right really in our DNA. It's easier for us to get on with nowadays because we're no longer a publicly quoted company, so we were on that treadmill for 21 years from 1984, and the family got that private control of, of the company in 2005. So that means we can focus on the long term.
Focusing on the long term is a challenge for most businesses, and if you're in a business, it will be a challenge for yours too. It's not just city investors obsessed with the short term, actually, we all are. Brexit's a great example.
While we're all focused on Brexit, we're sleepwalking over an environmental cliff edge, and if we don't take action now, there's really not much hope for future generations. I just want to do a quick couple of minutes on palm oil before I go to plastics because I know it's, it's, it's an important issue, but one that everybody's interested in. It's our other recent big campaign.
Some of you will have the privilege, like I have of spending time in the rainforest and seeing orangutans at firsthand. In fact, I, I know from personal experience that vets are absolutely on the front line there. So some of you might have expertise in that area.
But in Indonesia alone, you know, they're clearing 146 football pitches of rainforest every hour to keep pace with the demand for palm oil. And that's in 50% of, of supermarket products now. And so we announced in April that we're going to remove palm oil from all our own label food, by the end of, by the end of the year.
And we did it to give notice to the palm oil industry that they really need to clean up their act, because until last year, we asked people to use sustainable palm oil, and then we accepted it just doesn't work. And so we are pledged now not to use it until we know that it doesn't, it's not causing illegal deforestation. And at Christmas, we had a very interesting band, TV.
Which some of you may have seen. I haven't got time to go into the whole detail now, but this has been seen 70 million times, all over the world and has created quite a fuss. And at the end of 2018, the roundtable on sustainable palm oil have announced that they're going to have new standards that guarantee zero deforestation.
And also Wilma, one of the biggest producers followed them. So watch this space. Right, so.
What I didn't mention about my boss is that he's also a surfer, and he's also a climber, but it was him surfing through ocean plastic that made him aware of the crisis we're facing. And as a retailer, knowing that UK supermarkets have sleepwalked into generating well, nearly a million tonnes of single use plastic waste, he felt he had a responsibility to do something about it. He's also a trustee of Surfers Against Sewage, which has been mentioned, the campaigning charity, and of David Attenborough's charity for and Flora.
So our starting point was getting our own house in order. So in 2017, we focused on our head office, and we banned plastic bottles and Costa coffee cups and plastic cups, and we gave everybody an aluminium water bottle, and we changed all the water dispensers to fit them, and in a single sweep, we saved 12,000 plastic bottles and 235,000 single-use cups in a year. And those are the things that any business can do.
We've heard a lot of, scary statistics today about plastic, but the scariest one for me is the toothbrush test. So, can you remember your first toothbrush? I always ask people this.
I can't, but it's still out there, along with every other toothbrush you've ever owned. It'll be in a landfill a few miles from where you lived for another 500 years. If Henry the 8th had used a plastic toothbrush, it would be breaking down around now, not going away, breaking down into tiny bits of plastic.
And when our plastic breaks down in the environment, it's got nasty stuff in it. Arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, antimony, bromine, PCBs, which were banned in the 80s, but they've been found in human breast milk. In 2017, a dead killer whale in Scotland had 100 times above the level that scientists said would have bio biological consequences.
They stop animals reproducing. Plastic on sale now contains bisphenol A, which mimics oestrogen. It's got all kinds of issues, when tested on animals.
Canned cat food has been shown to cause hyperthyroidism, caused by BPA and it's absolutely everywhere. Last year, the University of Exeter found it in the bloodstream of 86% of the teenagers they tested. So in January, we pledged to turn down the tap on plastic production and became the first major retailer anywhere in the world to commit to eliminating plastic packaging from all of our own label products.
And we said we'd do that by 2023. Not a PR stunt, but because it's the right thing to do. And we talked to a whole load of experts, Greenpeace, suppliers, even David Attenborough, and customers were on board.
So 80% of customers told us they would endorse our move to go plastic free. In 2018, we got rid of 1500 tonnes of plastic packaging out of the 13,000 tonnes we've pledged to replace within five years. And soon we will have removed 100 million non-recyclable black plastic meal trays a year.
Packaging on eggs, gone, bananas, lemons, a whole range of other food. I won't bore you with the list. Bananas are a great example.
We haven't got the opportunity just now to sell this product in store, although we will soon trial it. Because of the way our stores are set up on our tills, but the easy thing was to swap polythene bags that bananas were in for a simple cardboard band. And also, there were lots of products where we could just redesign and we could take a plastic bag out of a cardboard box, for instance.
We've stopped selling 120 million single-use plastic carrier bags too, although that's a bit more complicated, 1500 extra tonnes of plastic gone, but they've been replaced with heavier bags for life, so we're relying on shoppers to use less of them. And the ideal obviously is for shoppers to bring their own. We've also signed up to a plastic free trust mark to signal to customers which products aren't in plastic, which seems obvious, but isn't, because actually we're starting to use things like cellulose made from plants, which look like plastic, looks like plastic, but it's compostable.
In some places we're actually looking at whole new technologies to achieve the best solutions. The news coverage from what we did reached a global audience. It came just after Blue Planet, which is brilliant because the public were really, really aware and ready for it.
We were congratulated by Parliament. We immediately started conversations with, with the Environment Minister. And we, we were followed by a flurry of other announcements from Westminster and the BBC and the royal household, even the Church in England and supermarkets, obviously keen to act.
We deposit return as mentioned earlier, this, this gets a 96% return of plastic bottles in places like Norway. And we are pioneering this in the UK. We've just finished a 6 month trial that brought in 311,000 plastic bottles into 4 of our stores.
We're now doing about 2500 a day, and we're lobbying the government to move very fast on this. And the interesting thing with that is that children are the motivators. We have had hundreds and hundreds of letters from children, drawings, poems, films, and that kind of tells you there's cause for hope.
What's next? We need innovation and we need systems change. Plastic recycling has to improve, but as has been already said today, it is absolutely not the only answer.
People talk about a circular economy, but it's really a spiral economy because plastic gets degraded in the system. We've got to turn down the tap. And our household waste system doesn't cope with compostable packaging.
So we're trying to move into paper and board and aluminium and glass to some extent, but actually we need new compostable packaging made from plants, and we need a UK waste system that collects it from your house with food waste and industrially composts it back into soil. And we haven't stopped at food. We've plastic microbeads in any product, and we were the first supermarket in the UK to stop plastic-free chewing gum, which I would strongly recommend.
In November, a major survey by the Environmental Investigation Agency and by Greenpeace said we were leading the field in tackling supermarket waste. We're doing our best to make a difference, . More importantly, perhaps, because we've taken a high profile lead, we sharpened the competitive instincts of the supermarkets.
So they are trying to do as much or even more than us, which is actually fantastic. So that's Iceland. I could talk a lot more about it.
One important thing perhaps to say at the end is that Carl mentioned surfers against so. We have sponsored plastic free communities for 2019, which already involves 100,000 volunteers. If you want to do something as a business, that's not just on the coast, it's urban areas too in the UK.
Look it up, just Google it and you can find what you can do. And in the summer, we'll start a new campaign, which is aimed at kids in some of our hard. Communities to get them re-engaged with nature, and it will be great at the right time to get that message out as well, because anybody working in the community can help us with that ambition.
So I will stop talking now and just say thank you all. Thank you to Webinar that and thank you to my co-speakers. It's such a privilege to talk to you.
Hillary, thank you very much. I think the, the thanks and, and gratitude has to come from our side to the likes of yourself and Kel and Claire. What you ladies are doing out there is, is truly phenomenal and deserves the support and respect of every human being on this planet.
You really do. So ladies, thank you so much.