29% of supermarket packaging cannot be recycled

Submitted by: The Two Sides Team October 4, 2018

An article taken from the latest edition of The Page. Written by Sam Upton

An investigation by Which? has found that up to 29% of plastic packaging is either non- recyclable or difficult to recycle.

The consumer champion looked at 27 own-brand items on sale in 10 major UK supermarkets and discovered that Lidl had the lowest proportion of widely recyclable packaging at 71%.

Iceland came next at 73%, followed by Ocado (74%) and Sainsbury’s (75%).

Top performer was Morrisons, with 81% of recyclable packaging. Which? also found that fewer than one in ten customers regularly take packaging back to the supermarket for recycling.

“Which? believes a lot more can be done to increase the amount of recyclable packaging and the way it is labelled so that consumers know what can be recycled and how to recycle it,” said Nikki Stopford, Director of Research and Publishing at Which?.

Increasingly, retailers and users of packaging are looking at paper and cardboard as a natural, sustainable and renewable alternative.

A lot of paper packaging is also made from recycled fibre – a positive example of a ‘circular economy’

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