Swapping for recycling purposes, Tesco has launched clear milk bottle caps replacing red, green, and blue ones. Following this initiative, the giant supermarket has rolled out 425 million milk bottles with transparent caps.
Under the UK’s current recycling rule, coloured and clear plastic must be sorted. As a result, the entire recycling process becomes challenging. Ultimately, the excessive workload diminishes the recycling efficiency and imposes extra costs for waste management firms.
Thus, Tesco Groceries has adopted a simple strategy to cope with these recycling issues. Through this, the grocer aims to convert 3,900 extra tonnes of extra plastic into brand-new bottles.
Tesco’s Category Director for Dairy, James Waddy, said: “Ensuring our packaging is as sustainable as possible is really important to us, and customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We will continue to look for ways to improve the packaging of our products, and make it even easier for customers to recycle at home.”
Tesco will implement this rule in all its stores, including four-, two-, and one-pint bottles. In addition to that, the brand will also ensure that whole, semi-skimmed, and skimmed milk are easily identifiable via labels on the bottles.
More From Tesco’s “Milk Bottle Clear Cap” Initiative
Tesco claims to have achieved a momentous milestone in this practice. So far, the company has gathered approximately 2.2 billion plastic pieces from the UK. This consists of 200 million bags from its delivery service, 100 million lids from edible items, and 33 million plastic pieces from bread and doughnuts.
In its mission to tackle the excessive consumption of plastic, Tesco promises to use 70% less plastic in fresh mince packaging. Also, the supermarket has started recycling used plastic food trays, enabling a fully circular packaging solution for chilled meals.
Besides that, Tesco is not only self-involved but encourages the government to schedule recycling infrastructure and the delivery of kerbside collection. Apart from its initiative to curb plastic consumption, Tesco has initiated considerable efforts to reduce fuel consumption.
Back in 2020, it introduced its first-ever EV delivery van in London. The company estimated that this change in delivery pattern had saved 15 million diesel delivery miles. Now, Tesco has launched its 500th EV delivery van with a target to establish a full-fledged electric home delivery fleet by 2030 in the UK.
In a nutshell, Tesco, the latest retailer to introduce this change, is playing an active role in making recycling simple and efficient for consumers as well as businesses.
