10-03-2025
Aussies take aim at hidden killer on supermarket shelves: 'Warrants further investigation'
You've probably never heard of the term, but you definitely know what it is.
There are plenty of supermarket products that when you get them home and open them up, it's hard not to notice there is more packaging than product. In fact, in some cases, there is about twice as much plastic than is actually necessary to house the contents. It is typically done for marketing purposes to make the item appear larger than it is, and thus more appealing to shoppers.
In the industry it's known as "non-functional slack fill" – and it's in the crosshairs of dedicated Aussies who are piecing together the global puzzle of plastic pollution.
"You may have never heard of the term before, but I guarantee you've seen it," says Heidi Taylor, the CEO of Tangaroa Blue, which has spent more than 20 years cataloguing plastic pollution that's washed up on Australian shores.
"It's when you open a package and there is more air in there than product. And there's no functional reason for that."
You're probably thinking of chip packets, but they actually do require the extra air so they don't get crushed. "But there's a lot of products that just have the size of the packaging excessive because it's good for marketing," she told Yahoo News Australia.
As a result, an untold amount of plastic ends up in the environment for no other reason than intentionally deceiving consumers.
The group — and its extensive network of partners and volunteers — recently investigated the extent of the issue by meticulously measuring everyday items and the ratio of actual product inside. And the findings, detailed in a 33-page report, were damning.
"About 89 per cent of the products surveyed had more than 50 per cent excess packaging," Taylor told Yahoo.
Among some of the worst products were Tide dishwasher pods (395ml of product to 1600ml of packaging), Gravox meat sauces (31ml of sauce to 250ml of plastic), Lindt Assorted chocolates (130ml to 1200ml) and Coles brand Organic Coconut Flakes (200ml to 1700 ml of packaging).
"The majority of packaging sampled was made or included components of soft plastics. This is significant because soft plastics are often more challenging to recycle and contribute substantially to plastic pollution," the report notes.
Coles had three in-house products identified as particularly bad offenders, and admitted to Yahoo News on Monday it could do better.
"Coles continues to work hard to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging from our stores. While Coles Own Brand Wellness Road Maca Powder and Organic Coconut Flakes are subject to product settling leading to headroom in the packaging, we recognise that the volume of slack filling identified in the report warrants further investigation with our supplier to understand if optimisations can be made to reduce unnecessary packaging," a spokesperson told Yahoo.
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The group has been presenting their work as part of an ongoing international forum backed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to produce a Global Plastics Treaty.
In November, Australia joined nations gathering in South Korea for the fifth round of negotiations to finalise the text of the treaty. Further meetings are scheduled for Switzerland this year before the global document is hopefully finalised next year.
The end result of the drawn-out process, aims to establish a legally binding international framework to comprehensively address plastic pollution throughout its entire lifecycle — from production and design to disposal and recycling.
One small outcome, if Tangaroa Blue gets its way, could see the amount of superfluous plastic used in packaging everyday supermarket items dramatically reduced.
"If we're looking for ways of reducing packaging, we can regulate the amount of air that is allowed in products," Heidi said. "And that would not only reduce plastic production but it would also reduce, significantly, the amount of waste we're creating because of those products."
Tackling things like non-functional slack fill is just one aspect of addressing a slow-moving global crisis that hitherto has shown very few signs of improving.
"We know plastic lasts for hundreds and hundreds of years... we have to stop making decisions on things that just make life easy," Heidi argued.
"If we're really going to address not only plastics in our oceans, but plastics in our bodies and every part of our world, we need to start reducing plastic production and we need to continue to phase out items that shouldn't be made out of plastic in the first place."
According to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, it's estimated some 145,000 tonnes of plastic enters our environment each year in Australia, which equates to 250 kilograms a minute.
Meanwhile about 100,000 marine animals are thought to be killed globally by ocean plastic ingestion or entanglement each year.
