Anthony Brimelow, Commercial Director at Duclo Recycling, explains how the recent investigation into major supermarket’s soft plastic take-back schemes was misguided.
Big brands face constant scrutiny – it comes with the territory. Whether it’s about financial, operational, ethical, or environmental concerns, companies with considerable market share and clout are regularly called out over their practices and initiatives.
However, do such moves always prove constructive? Can they sometimes miss the issues and unfairly penalise businesses that are positively striving to enhance sustainability?
Sainsbury’s and Tesco both recently came under fire for their environmental practices and faced misguided demands and calls to do more. The risk here is that finger-pointing does more harm than good.
Let me explain.
Campaign group Everyday Plastic and the Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) accused the supermarkets of failing to recycle a significant proportion of soft plastic.
According to their investigation, 70% of tracked material collected through supermarket recycling schemes ended up being turned into fuel pellets, burnt for energy or downcycled overseas.
Campaigners accused the duo of “misleading” customers over the recycling of soft plastic and called for Sainsbury’s and Tesco to “publicly and urgently” support a 40% cut in global plastic production by 2040, stating that “far too much unnecessary plastic packaging is being produced”.
The supermarkets, rightly, defended their position and their “clear plan” for removing packaging wherever possible.
Nobody can argue that more can always be done when it comes to plastic waste, but the fact is supermarkets are trying to support plastic recycling.
Rather than criticising the supermarkets, wouldn’t it have been more positive and constructive to understand why materials in recycling schemes are being used in the way they are? Why are they downcycled?
Why are they used for energy generation? The answer to these questions is that the scale of infrastructure simply does not exist in the UK to back up supermarkets’ recycling efforts.
In this country, there is a complete lack of segregation and closed-loop recycling facilities to sort and process the same types of plastic packaging to avoid downcycling and converting to energy and fuel.
By keeping plastic materials in the same recycling streams (closed-loop), we can effectively reduce our reliance on virgin resources, helping to preserve the performance of the material and its multiple recycling and reuse.
Many retailers are closing the loop on post-consumer plastic waste in the UK and offering take-back schemes for customers to help reduce the volume and strain on household collection points.
The real focus and questions should be asked of the government.
This should be celebrated and more should be done to encourage other retailers to segregate their post-consumer plastic waste and use UK recyclers to keep this important material in the loop.
Undue criticism directed at the supermarkets could hurt consumer recycling efforts and future behaviours.
The real focus and questions should be asked of the government.
From 2022 to 2024, HMRC collected over £553 million in revenue from the Plastic Packaging Tax – a tax introduced to provide a clear economic incentive to use recycled plastic in packaging and stimulate an uptake in recycling and collection of plastic waste.
If this is the aim of the government, then more pressure needs to be put on ministers for these proceeds to be invested in the UK’s closed-loop recycling infrastructure.
To keep this valuable material in the economy and close the loop on plastic waste, we need to focus on building a more robust system that improves waste collection, challenges existing contracts, educates retail staff on the importance and benefits of recycling flexible plastic, while tackling basic in-store challenges, such as creating more space to store waste.
This has to be done collaboratively with industry and is only possible with a firm commitment and funding from government.
This would go a long way to solving the issues identified by the Everyday Plastic and EIA investigation.
