The results of the consumer poll told us that consumers felt that recycling had the biggest impact on reducing plastic waste, then sustainable food packaging, then promoting reusable cups, then education of staff and customers and least impactful was future schemes. From this we were then able to weight each category. Recycling was weighted the highest, and future schemes was weighted the lowest, meaning it had less of an impact on a brands PMR score. 

To calculate the weighting for each category we multiplied the score as a percentage by the marks available in that category. As a result it meant that one unweighted mark became worth the following:

Recycling: 0.26

Packaging: 0.24

Cups: 0.22

Education: 0.15

Future Schemes: 0.13

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We then ran an internal focus group to assign marks to each question we ask the businesses. Each question was given a mark on how important the participants deemed it to reducing plastic waste of a business; the higher the mark for the question then the higher its importance for reducing plastic. The question of banning single use cups in the cafe is worth more marks than having bio-degradeable cups. Banning single use cups is worth 4 marks, so once weighted it is worth 0.88  (0.22 x 4)

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From this we could then derive the bands for our rating, band 5 being the best and band 1 being the lowest. To get a band 5 a business must score 80% or higher, which was calculated by multiplying the total available marks (6.07) by 0.8. We also created a band system to give a score for each each category following the same process.