Tesco has called on the government to bring in regulation to encourage a major shift towards reusable plastic packaging.
The UK’s biggest retailer also said ministers needed to take action to reverse the trend of recycling facilities closing their doors. It warned that the war on plastic would not succeed unless a viable market was created for reusable packaging.
Tesco’s call comes with the industry due to launch its new UK Packaging Pact, a successor to the Plastics Pact launched seven years ago, next month, with a major industry switch towards a reuse packaging model one of its key planks.
Speaking at the London Packaging Week conference last week, Tesco head of packaging James Bull said huge challenges faced the new pact, but that it could succeed with the right regulatory backdrop.
“If you look back to 2018 and the launch of the Plastics Pact, back then the scale of the challenge and things like eliminating black plastic felt almost insurmountable,” he said.
“But we unlocked it by coming together and working a an industry.”
Bull said there was a “long list” of barriers facing the pact, due to be launched by Wrap and Defra, but that the key industry players, including the majority of the UK’s major supermarkets, were committed towards a major reduction in single-use plastic.
However, he added that currently the UK did not have sufficient recycling facilities or adequate incentives to encourage the major shift needed into reuse.
“We must make sure that legislation is designed in the right way to create these platforms at scale,” he said.
“Yes, there is a need for more recycled content but there also a need to make sure that the recycling industry is working effectively and efficiently and that there is a cash value for the material that they are working on.
“At the moment the story is one of recyclers closing, not opening.”
In July this year, supermarkets including Tesco, Aldi, Morrisons, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s made a commitment to move towards a full-scale reuse packaging model by 2030, despite a string of pilots across the industry having been wound up.
Earlier this month, the company behind Tesco’s abandoned reusable packaging trial with major brands such as Coca-Cola, Heinz and Pepsi told The Grocer the government needed to bring in French-style regulations forcing supermarkets to switch to reuse at scale or risk losing the war on plastic.
Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle and boss of pioneering reuse system Loop, said France’s experience had shown a combination of regulation and funding incentives could help the industry move from “pointless pilots” to full-scale rollout.
Bull said that for a full-scale reuse model to work, shoppers needed to have an expectation that they would be using reusable containers for products, whether it was in Tesco or any other major retailer.
Sebastian Munden, former Unilever UK CEO and chair of Wrap, told the conference the new packaging pact had “big challenges to crack” but said the industry could take heart from successes of the Plastics Pact, launched when Michael Gove was the secretary of state for the environment.
Munden said the pact had seen a “step change” in the industry war on plastic thanks to “collaboration between supermarkets, the food industry and the waste industry”.
It included a 7% reduction in plastic in the market (33 billion items) and elimination of 99.8% of unnecessary items identified by Wrap.
However, the pact will wind up this year with three of its four targets for 2025 unmet, including only 70% of plastic being reusable or recyclable, rather than the 100% target, and only 59% being effectively recycled, against a target of 70%.
The Grocer revealed earlier this month that the new pact would not include specific targets but instead feature “easier to adapt” 10-year-goals.
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