What drives the project?
Food packaging is part of French people’s daily lives, providing many services but also generating numerous environmental impacts, which companies and consumers are more and more aware of.
Thus, 29% of French citizens consider that waste management is one of the most worrying environmental issues (source: Déchets chiffres-clés L’essentiel 2021 – published by ADEME, the French Agency for Ecological Transition). Most of the waste we produce in France is not recycled but buried or burned; either because we do not know how to recycle the material or because we do not collect it. Several recent laws (AGEC, the law “Climate and Resilience“) aim to reduce the impact of packaging by mobilising companies, consumers and government services.
To grant everyone the means to act, Open Food Facts and the ADEME Agency are launching an exceptional participatory operation to collect complete data on food packaging. This is a valuable resource to find ways to reduce their environmental impact, promote eco-conception, help waste sorting, support the environmental labelling* efforts, and research. This data will be consolidated in a public database, accessible to all and updated over time. This project will be carried out in collaboration with manufacturers and consumers.
| *Focus on environmental labelling: The Climate and Resilience law aims to deploy environmental labelling in the main French consumer sectors by 2025. The food sector is one of the readiest: the government’s intention is to deploy an official system in 2023. Packaging data will be taken into account in the calculation of the new score. Collecting this data upstream will accelerate the deployment of official environmental labelling, in France and internationally. |
About the “Tackling Food Packaging” project
Open Food Facts will collect very precise information on each element of food packaging (shape, material, weight, sorting instructions) from manufacturers and citizens.
This information will be freely reusable (“open data”).
It will enable ADEME and all stakeholders (researchers, public decision-makers, journalists, experts, producers, teachers, and the general public) to better understand the leverages for reducing the impact of food packaging in the current environmental context.
| The “Tackling Food Packaging” project consists of: 🔵 on the one hand, improve the data collection tools in Open Food Facts (software, tutorials, documentation) to allow the greatest number of people to contribute 🔵 on the other hand, conduct a “flash” operation until the end of March 2023 to massively enrich the database with the participation of companies and consumers. |
This project will create transparent, accessible, reusable (open data) and totally new information to reach many goals:
- Informing consumers: by allowing them to identify products with the least impactful packaging, and to follow the evolution of their packaging consumption.
- Encouraging eco-conception: by stimulating emulation between brands, providing manufacturers and industries with detailed statistics on the packaging of their products and suggesting possible eco-conception options on our free platform for producers.
- Supporting environmental labelling: the data collected will allow us to validate the formula of the future official environmental label, and then to make it available to the general public (via apps, online sales sites, etc.)
- Improve public policies: public authorities will be able to use open-data for new purposes (prediction and monitoring of packaging-related waste production, quantification of the impact of public policies, leverage of public action on the various players).
- Support and fuel scientific research: researchers from all over the world will be able to cross data, compare them in different countries, and identify new ways to reduce the impact of food packaging.
To do so, we need detailed information on the packaging of each product, including the shape (box, bottle, etc.), the material (PET plastic, glass, etc.), the instructions for recycling and (ideally) the weight of each element of the packaging.
We therefore call for :
- Citizens to enter the packaging data of the products they consume into the Open Food Facts database, via the website or the application
- Manufacturers to submit their product packaging data to Open Food Facts via the platform for professionals (or by contacting producers@openfoodfacts.org)
Join the data collection effort!
The priority is to collect information from the manufacturers as much as possible. Indeed, you possess the most accurate information, that’s already centralised for your products. We are committed to making it as easy as possible for you to share information on a technical and IT level, and to use your data in priority to consumers’ inputs in order to maximise the quality and transparency of the database.
Why take part into the project as a manufacturer? 🧐
Beyond contributing to the common good through the points mentioned above, filling in the complete packaging data on Open Food Facts will allow you to:
- Refine the calculation of the current Eco-Score on all your product sheets.
- Be one step ahead for the calculation of the future official environmental display.
- Benchmark the packaging of your product.
- Position yourself as a committed player by choosing transparency.
How to contribute ? 🤝
To participate, it is very simple :
- 1️⃣ Download the Excel Template (by clicking on this link), and fill it in with the packaging data (the header of each column contains an explanatory text about the data to be provided).
Or → Extract packaging data from your internal system, in the format of your choice.
- 2️⃣ Log into your professional space, then import the completed file.
Or → If you do not have an account, please send us your file at producers@openfoodfacts.org
| ❓In case you have a question, please contact producers@openfoodfacts.org, we’re here to help! |
To relive the launch event
You’ll find the video recordings (FR only) of our launch event at the Académie du Climat on the 12th of January.
On the agenda:
🗣 Opening by Boris Ravignon (ADEME’s president) and Diane Simiu (Assistant to the General Commissioner for Sustainable Development at the Ministry of Ecological Transition).
🗣 Introduction by Vincent COLOMB (“Environmental labelling” Coordinator, ADEME).
>> Consult the slides presented by ADEME
🗣 Presentation of the Open Food Facts project and of the “Tackling Food Packaging” operation by Pierre Slamich(co-founder of Open Food Facts)
>> Consult the slides presented by Open Food Facts
Round table about food packaging with the following speakers:
🗣 Romain Tramoy – Laboratoire Eau, Environnement et Systèmes Urbains (Leesu)
🗣 Ludivine SAVEAN – Maison Le Goff
🗣 Moïra Tourneur – Zero Waste France
🗣 Agathe Grossmith – Carrefour
🗣 Claudia Giacovelli – United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI)
🎤 Moderation by Charles Nepote and Manon Corneille – Open Food Facts
🙋❓Questions/Answers
Stay tuned → Follow us on our social media accounts to make sure to stay updated on our open and participative project ! Twitter, Instagram, Facebook et LinkedIn.