This is the dilemma that families all over the country are wrestling with: Should you recycle bread bags, pizza wrappers and crisps packets?
Now Morrisons hopes to have solved the conundrum – by collecting all types of soft plastic we use at home and sending it to its own recycling plant.
According to the supermarket, its Fife facility is unique in its type and can turn 15,000 tonnes of difficult-to-recycle packaging per year into plastic flakes and pellets for use in Morrisons shops and in other building and agricultural trades.
Customers will initially need to take their soft plastic bags into Morrisons. The Mail was told Sunday by David Potts, chief executive of Morrisons. He said that his company has been working with local authorities to collect soft plastic material from households across the country.
Morrisons plans to take all kinds of soft plastic from our homes and recycle it at its recycling facility. It will turn 15,000 tons of recyclable waste packaging each year.
Customers will first need to take their soft plastics into Morrisons in bags.
The majority of councils are currently limited to recycling hard plastics. They have higher value and can be turned into new products more easily.
If the Morrisons pilot scheme – in six Edinburgh stores – proves to be a success, it is set to be rolled out to all 498 shops over the next year.
According to Mr Potts, the company has already made plans for additional recycling plants in the UK as it expands.
He said: ‘We’ve all seen the terrible pictures of plastic on beautiful Indonesian and Philippine beaches. And I’ve seen first-hand how it is affecting our coastlines when I’ve spent time on beach-cleans here in Britain.
‘It’s unacceptable. We began to look for an answer. This led us to invest in a new recycling facility. We’ve all come a long way towards turning the tide on plastics. But it’s not enough. We need to turn our attention to soft plastics.’
Each year, the UK consumes around 150 million tonnes of soft plastics. This plastic is used for a variety of daily items, such as salad bags, sweet wrappers, and other everyday objects. Technology has been lacking to allow them to be recycled.
The plastic ends up being either incinerated on landfill sites, or exported to developing nations.
Even where soft plastic is currently collected – for example, at other supermarkets – experts say the final destination recycling plants often ‘cherry-pick’ the items, discarding harder-to-recycle materials.
If the Morrisons pilot scheme – in six Edinburgh stores – proves to be a success, it is set to be rolled out to all 498 shops over the next year
Mr Potts said part of the problem was that there has ‘never been anything it could commercially be used for’.
But Morrisons will be ‘literally building shops out of the plastic we recycle’ by using the so-called Ecosheets created at its Fife plant instead of plywood.
These sheets are also great for building animal barns. They require very little effort to produce. The sheets can be recycled and will last up to ten times longer that plywood.
Morrisons is the UK’s first supermarket to set up its own recycling operation thanks to Fife. By 2025, it hopes to be the first retailer to recycle at least the same amount of plastic as the products they sell.
lRead more about why David Potts and Morrisons want to revolutionise plastic recycling at mailonsunday.co.uk/potts