By removing coloured plastic and changing blue, red and green milk caps to a clear alternative, on some 425 million bottles of milk annually, Tesco is improving the quality of recovered material from household waste and enabling the cap to be recycled back into new milk bottles. Customers are encouraged to squash or crush empty bottles, replacing the original lid before recycling to ensure it's not lost or discarded.
Coloured plastic currently has to be processed separately from clear packaging, so this simple, yet effective change, means every year 3,900 extra tonnes of recycled plastic will be able to go back into making new milk bottles, a process which can be repeated each and every time a customer recycles it.
The move will be seen in all Tesco stores, across 4 pint, 2 pint and 1 pint plastic milk bottles. However, different types of milk, whole, semi-skimmed or skimmed, will still be easy for staff and shoppers of identify, thanks to coloured labels around the main bottle.
James Waddy, who is Category Director for Dairy at Tesco, said: “Ensuring our packaging is as sustainable as possible is very important to us, and customer feedback on our trials of these new clear milk caps was overwhelmingly positive. Of course, we'll continue to look for ways to improve the packaging of all of our products, thus helping to make it even easier for customers to recycle at home.”
Tesco follows its 4Rs strategy when it comes to plastic and packaging, aiming to remove plastic where possible, reduce where it can't, reuse more and recycle what is left.
Earlier this month, Tesco announced a trial of fresh mince ‘pillow packs’, which use 70% less plastic and are fully recyclable at in-store soft plastic collection points.
To date, Tesco has removed around 2.2 billion pieces of plastic from its UK business, including:
200+ million bags from Tesco.com deliveries
100+ million extra lids from products such as wipes, creams, yogurts and desserts
33 million pieces of plastic from bakery bread and doughnuts
Incidentally here is the link to the story about the fresh mince trial that we carried a few weeks ago:
https://thatsfoodanddrink.blogspot.com/2023/08/tesco-unveils-fresh-mince-pillow-packs.html