How supermarket soft plastic take-back schemes are misleading customers
Authors
- Pages
- 38
- Published in
- United Kingdom
Table of Contents
- The hard truth about soft plastic 1
- How supermarket soft plastic take-back schemes are misleading customers 1
- Authors 2
- Acknowledgements 2
- Disclaimer 2
- Contents 2
- 1. Introduction 3
- Tracking the truth: the investigation 3
- Plastics crisis 4
- Policy setting 5
- Citizen demand 6
- 2. What are supermarkets doing to tackle the plastics crisis? 6
- Justifying the need for plastic packaging 7
- The UK Plastics Pact 7
- Supermarket targets 8
- Recyclability 8
- Reduction 8
- 3. Is soft plastic labelled recyclable, actually recyclable? 9
- What is post-consumer soft plastic? 10
- How is ‘recyclable’ defined? 10
- Can soft plastic be recycled in the UK? 11
- ‘Hard-to-recycle’ 11
- Can soft plastic be closed-loop recycled? 12
- What about chemical recycling? 13
- What happens to soft plastic packaging waste when it isn’t recycled? 13
- Why is some soft plastic packaging labelled recyclable? 13
- 4. Is the soft plastic packaging collected at Sainsbury’s and Tesco supermarkets being recycled? 15
- Sainsbury’s 19
- Fuelling the fire 19
- Incinerating soft plastic to recover energy 19
- Between the supermarket and the incinerator 19
- Final destination: unknown 20
- Tesco 21
- Downcycling is not recycling 21
- Reliance on export 21
- Final destination: unknown 21
- Eurokey: a key player 22
- Soft plastic packaging waste exports 22
- Trackers exported from Sainsbury’s suggest that collected soft plastic packaging waste is also likel 23
- Trackers infer that Tesco collected soft plastic packaging waste is often exported for recycling. 23
- 5. Conclusion: why do take-back schemes exist? 26
- 6. The key takeaways 27
- Customers are being misled 27
- Take-back schemes may be obstructing genuine solutions 28
- 7. Recommendations 29
- 8. Endnotes 31
