It was sadly inevitable that the most comprehensive update so far on the industry’s progress in the war on plastic would get virtually no coverage in the national media today.

It did not help that Wrap’s report on the UK Plastics Pact was delayed until after the election by the arcane rules of purdah, which mean any potentially politically damaging documents are put on ice, leaving the field free for party spin doctors to set the agenda.

By the time the report was published today, it found itself buried by the latest news on Brexit and the (also predictable) renewed threat of a no-deal.

It also emerged weeks after a controversial Greenpeace report on plastic reduction, which accused supermarkets of producing more plastic than ever.

Today’s report is by far the more robust of the two – Wrap accuses Greenpeace’s figures of being full of errors and “comparing apples with pears” – but sometimes timing is everything.

And the Plastic Pact’s presentation problems run deeper than the delays caused by election gagging.

Getting such a large swathe of major retailers and suppliers together to agree on a reporting mechanism was always going to be a Herculean task, which means today is the first time the industry has actually revealed a baseline figure for the amount of plastic packaging it produces.

In total, more than one million tonnes of plastic packaging was produced in the first year of the Pact, it revealed.

But while that figure accounts for over 80% of plastic produced by the industry, it only applies to 2018, and therefore does not include the amount of plastic that has been taken out of the system since then.

It will not be until the end of 2020 that we will get comparative figures showing where the industry has succeeded.

The slow-moving nature of the reporting mechanism means that many of the key issues are inevitably out of date.

For example, the report says since the Pact was launched in April last year, supermarkets and suppliers have come up with plans to get rid of 1.1 billion items of avoidable single-use plastic by 2020.

That might look like good news, but it does not include a further 19 different types of single-use plastic, including black plastic, which are “under investigation” by Wrap.

In reality, as The Grocer reported last month, supermarkets are on the verge of eliminating these products, but the figures are yet to play catch-up. Which has left the door open for campaign groups to call for the goals of the Pact to be more ambitious, and accuse the industry of making excuses for its slow progress.

The challenge for Wrap and the industry is how to get its evidence base heard above the noise and become more fleet of foot in its reporting.

As yet, it is still too often a case of individual retailers and suppliers announcing a drip feed of news on plastic reduction, which on the whole carries little weight with consumers.

One thing is for sure: once Boris Johnson and his new-look government get around to tackling plastic in the environment bill, with plans for a plastic tax, DRS and a major shake-up of producer responsibilities on the cards, they will be expecting more than year-old figures.

That’s why the industry needs to raise its game and adjust to the 24/7 news agenda in which the war on plastic, along with Brexit, will inevitably dominate the year to come.