Josh Brooks, packagingnews.co.uk, 19 August 2009

Many years ago, Stella Artois was reassuringly expensive and its often sumptuous advertising focused on associating the brand with scenes of bucolic bliss in the French countryside - despite it being Belgian.

Yet times have changed. In its latest ad campaign, Stella Artois has chosen to promote itself on its packaging's environmental credentials.

One poster in the ‘Recyclage de Luxe' campaign, as it is known, shouts about the fact that 75% of the glass in its bottles is recycled, while another, featuring a beautiful Citroen DS, highlights that 50% of the material in Stella's cans is recycled.

As you can see, the idea of timeless French style is maintained in the posters, and long may that continue. And as well as appealing to the environmental consciences of consumers, the campaign should go some distance to helping Stella shed the unfortunate ‘wifebeater' tag that it picked up in recent years.

But is this new campaign part of a trend? This is the second major advertising campaign in recent months that has focused on the greenness of the packaging. Ariel's Excel Gel, which launched last year, made a big play of the fact that its packaging used 45% less plastic than previous incarnations of the distinctive ‘pebble' bottle - even if the real innovation was in the fact of concentrating the product.

There are surely other examples. Yet given the efforts that companies are going to to reduce their environmental impact by lightweighting or otherwise ‘greening' their packaging, it's surprising that more brands don't talk about those efforts in their advertising.

Even if there is a danger that the claims can be spurious or misleading, packaging, as we keep saying, has a great environmental story to tell. If more brands followed the lead of Stella Artois and Ariel and promoted their efforts publicly, I have no doubt that the public perception of our industry's products would improve.