When I was at boarding school in Kenya, there was a memorable moment when Pringles arrived in the student snack shop. They were imported and cost the equivalent of a month’s pocket-money, so I never bought any. Richer friends did, and they kind of blew our minds. Nothing tasted like them. Fake, naturally, but industrialised food was very exciting when there was so little of it around.
Pringles were new to me, but familiar to my American friends. They were launched in 1968, with their distinctive hyperbolic paraboloid shape, and a tube to stack them in. Over the years they came to be sold around the world, reaching rural Kenya in the mid nineties.
It was also in the nineties that a problem with that tubular can began to emerge. Recycling was becoming more common, and a Pringles can doesn’t belong. It has a plastic lid and a cardboard tube, but the tube is lined with metallic paper and it has a steel base. It can’t go in any of the recycling bins. It’s a hybrid and a freak, and it soon became notorious as a ‘problem’ package.
The CEO of Recycling UK went so far as to call Pringles cans a “nightmare”, and the “number one recycling villain.”
Pringles didn’t care. Their packaging was iconic and sales were good. The tube might be “a bastion of bad design from a recycling point of view”, but from an advertising perspective it was gold and once the people popped they couldn’t stop.
Having cranked out over five decades’ of unrecyclable tubes, Pringles did eventually do a deal to create drop-off points for used cans across the UK. I wonder how many people ever used them. You have to be very committed to recycling to take your Pringles cans to a dedicated drop-off point. Someone that obsessed with recycling would probably just choose a different brand of potato snack and save themselves the trouble. This is indeed what I did. “We’ll talk about it when they make their can recyclable,” is something my children have heard several times in the snack aisle.
Consumers finally began to see some genuine alternatives from around 2019, with trials of all-steel cans in Italy and paper ones in the UK. If you’re a Pringles devotee you may have already encountered their latest all-paper tube in branches of Tesco, where it is currently an exclusive. It’s been tested for consumer appeal and has been proven to keep their potato-based UPF wafers fresh for just as long as the traditional packaging. It still has a plastic lid, unfortunately.
How did it take so long? Well, according to Packaging News their parent company (Kellanova, formerly Kellogg’s) spent £86 million developing and rolling out the new design. That’s a lot of money and perhaps its not surprising they took their time.
The other thing to remember is that nobody made them do it. No government regulations stopped them from making an unrecyclable product, despite the fact that local authorities had to foot the bill for landfilling hundreds of millions of cans over the years. Not that the Pringles press release acknowledges this, as they’re too busy congratulating themselves and claiming sustainability leadership.
Still, recycling’s number one villain is hopefully on the way out. The 90% paper can is getting a gradual introduction in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium. Maybe Kellanova will see its way to phasing them out in the other 140 countries where they’re sold too, eventually.
The Earthbound Report 
Don’t buy them anymore..they among so many others support israel regime’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
I have read your views earlier on how individual efforts don’t make much difference. But it seems to me that the problem is created entirely by billions of individual choices like buying Pringles or not.
But surely the bigger problem is the decision the manufacturer made. Which is easier – persuade a billion people not to buy Pringles? Or get Pringles to change their packaging?
But there are millions of other brands of packaged chips, most one them using fused plastic which is unrecyclable. All equally terrible for the environment. Isn’t it better to educate people out of buying such packaged goods? We buy chips from shops that make them fresh. We carry steel tins to buy, but if you want to buy and eat on the run, what’s wrong with compostable paper bags? Give your local shops business instead of some polluting multinational!
In an ideal world we’d all have a local shop that makes them fresh, though I haven’t seen that since I lived in Madagascar – and even there people sealed them into plastic bags to sell. Without that local alternative, the only solution for us would be not to eat them at all.
I’m not convinced educating people is the easier solution though. How many people would need to be convinced to stop buying packaged snacks? Three billion? Four billion? Compare that to the number of people who need to be convinced to design and adopt better packaging – a specific industry and its professionals. That feels much more manageable.
What about your famous British fish and chip shops? If there were demand I’m sure they’d produce fresh chips. Education is important because, even in my country where there’s a chips shop every 500m, people only buy the stuff in pre-packed sealed plastic. So simple to avoid so many thousands of plastic bags a day, and yet no one does it! It makes me want to weep.
For some unknown reason I have always tired after reading for more than about 15 mins and often never finish a book. I adore pearls of wisdom and I’ve decided that you should write a book of that nature with chapters of many, if not all, the subjects you have covered but just snippets, ( preferably one short sentence ), of the pearls.
When will it be available please? 😉
I rather like that idea! I’m not sure I’d ever persuade anyone to publish it, but it would be an interesting exercise to focus the mind. What is the most important single sentence that could be said about this topic?
That looks like a natural process of dealing with an issue that is unsustainable to the environment, the arrival of a strong alternative.