Aldi is first supermarket member of the Podback recycling team

Aldi is to become the first supermarket member of the Podback recycling scheme, helping its customers to recycle their used coffee, tea and hot chocolate pods.

As part of its membership of the scheme, the supermarket will introduce its own-label pods into the Podback scheme in an industry first, whilst also helping to promote the free recycling service to shoppers throughout the country in over 980 stores.

From early 2023, Aldi customers can visit the Podback website to order recycling bags, which can be filled and taken to one of 6,500 Collect+ drop off points, or register for kerbside collections if they live in a participating local council area.

Podback launched last year and is the first coffee pod recycling service of its kind in the UK. It was launched by Nestle and Jacobs Douwe Egberts UK and membership has since grown to include 16 brands from across the coffee sector.

Pods recycled via Podback are reprocessed within the UK. Recycled aluminium pods are used in the manufacture of beverage cans and car components, and plastic coffee pods into items such as furniture, industrial packaging and building products. The used coffee grounds also go through anaerobic digestion to produce a combination of biogas and soil improver.

Aldi is one of the market leaders in own-label coffee pods, and also sells branded products as Specialbuys.  By using the Podback service, customers could help to recycle up to 268 tonnes of plastic and 20 tonnes of aluminum Aldi own-label coffee pods each year.

Richard Gorman, Plastics and Packaging Director at Aldi, said: “We’re pleased to be joining Podback on this journey – especially as the first supermarket member.

“It’s important to us that we help customers do the right thing once our hot drink pods have been used, and we look forward to seeing how our partnership with Podback progresses.”

Rick Hindley, Executive Director at Podback, said: “We are delighted to welcome Aldi as the first supermarket brand member of Podback. This marks a key milestone for the programme and we are looking forward to working with Aldi to promote our service to their customers. We hope other retailers will follow Aldi’s lead and offer their own-brand pod customers the opportunity to recycle through Podback.”

www.aldi.co.uk

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Is your Sleep Sabotaging your Diet?

When talking about weight loss, you’d usually bring up exercise, nutrition and even genetics as the main factors in play. And while that’s very much the case, a new 2022 study done by the Sleep Research Society pointed the spotlight at another important and often overlooked factor: sleep.

In the study, 195 adults with obesity were designated to an 8-week low-calorie diet followed by an entire year of observation and weight maintenance. They were then categorized by two metrics,  whether or not they worked out and whether they received liraglutide or a placebo.

From there, the study followed all the participants’ weight fluctuations plus their sleep duration and quality. And what they discovered was a very strong link between sleep and weight fluctuation in adults who have obesity.

For one, participants who were measured as having bad sleep quality on average lost less weight during the 8-week diet than those who slept more soundly. And even on a subjective level, those who reported having a worse sleep also didn’t shed as many pounds as their counterparts.

And these results stayed consistent within the weight maintenance phase, too. During the 52-week maintenance phase, participants who on average slept under 6 hours a night saw no decrease in their body fat percentage, while those who slept more than 6 hours on average, did. In fact, each added hour of mean sleep corresponded to a weight loss of -1.7 kg or a body fat percentage decrease of 0.80%.

Sleep quality played an equally vital role during this stage, with those who were described as having good sleep quality on average losing 1.5kg more and having 0.1% body fat less. The difference was even more noticeable with people who had good sleep quality prior to the maintenance phase, with the difference against their counterparts being -3.5kg or -1.3% body fat.

But when looking at the difference between the exercise and no-exercise groups, the difference wasn’t as shocking as one would expect. Although weight loss persisted within the exercise group during the maintenance phase while the no-exercise group stagnated, the effect on sleep was surprisingly subtle.

Both measured sleep duration and sleep quality decreased in both groups at a very similar level. The only difference is that those who exercised had fewer daytime disturbances and better-perceived sleep quality.

And when it came to the difference between the liraglutide and placebo groups, the differences were also less significant than one might think. Weight loss was maintained within the liraglutide group while the placebo group stagnated. Sleep duration was prolonged in the liraglutide group for the first 26 weeks before tapering off by the end of the trial year. And sleep quality decreased within both groups equally.

All of this is to say that sleep duration and sleep quality are much more important factors in weight loss than most give them credit for. Even when compared with exercise and medication specifically designed to battle obesity in adults, differences in sleep routines showed a significant impact on a person’s weight during the weight maintenance period.

https://www.thesleepadvisors.co.uk.

GUNNA Drinks sends 'cheeky' message to big rival over their pollution

Award winning craft lemonade brand, GUNNA Drinks has delivered a cheeky middle finger sculpture made of plastic cola bottles to Coca Cola with the message “Pick Up Your Crap” for Christmas.

Following the launch of their petition to ban the use of single-use plastic bottles in the manufacture of soft drinks, GUNNA Drinks created a piece of art for Coca Cola made from their discarded plastic cola bottles. 

The GUNNA team hand delivered their unique ‘message made of bottles’ (in the form of a slightly naughty middle finger!) to Coca Cola’s flagship store which is in Covent Garden.

The Sculpture took a tour of London’s iconic locations, including Trafalgar Square, Westminster and Oxford Street accompanied by protesters dressed as marine wildlife to show the impact these bottles are having on animals and the habitats they call home.

Melvin Jay, Founder and CEO of GUNNA Drinks said: “It's really time for the Big Soda companies to take responsibility for picking up their own crap and stop polluting our planet! They could easily switch to cans or glass, but unfortunately these companies seem to love money more than they love our planet. This has to stop, so we are asking everyone to take a stand against plastic waste.”

In the UK 7.7 billion plastic bottles are used annually, with the average person in the UK now using 150 plastic bottles every year. That's over – that’s over three a week. Many are discarded, ending up polluting our rivers and seas. 83% of the plastic packaging waste we throw away in the UK comes from food and drink packaging.

GUNNA Drinks pledged to be carbon negative and eliminate twice the carbon they create, making them the UK's most carbon-negative craft soft drink. GUNNA also invests in the Clean Oceans project, which picks up plastic bottles from the ocean, so they pick up Big Cola’s mess for them. Off the back of being carbon negative the GUNNA team have pledged to go even further with lobbying the UK government to take action against plastic bottles.

The petition can be found here https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/624995?fbclid=IwAR2k48O4begzT9aaUQ-kM2-pScZnDEYUl3hJI7WaLmlAMPYWnFwoaXiER9E  and GUNNA are asking for those who support the ban of plastic bottles to share this on social media using the hashtag #letscanplastic

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