Morrisons ditches hard-to-recycle black plastic from its products

The move accounts for almost 4,000 tonnes of plastic being made more easily recyclable

Morrisons has announced plans to eliminate hard-to-recycle black plastic from all of its own brand food and drinks packaging.

The move accounts for almost 4,000 tonnes of plastic being made more easily recyclable – that’s 7.4% of the plastic used at the supermarket every year.

It is part of Morrisons’ commitment to ensure all its packaging is recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.

Conventional black plastic packaging is coloured using carbon black pigments and is therefore invisible to optical sorting equipment at plastic recovery and sorting facilities, resulting in the packaging being disposed of in landfill or incinerated.

Its ready meal range now uses recyclable plastic which contains around 85% of recycled content.

Natasha Cook, Packaging Manager at Morrisons said: “It’s important to our customers that we make it easier to recycle plastic and so we are very pleased to announce that we’ve been able to eliminate black plastic from our own-brand products.”

The supermarket adds its commitments have already helped remove around 9,000 tonnes of unnecessary plastic each year.

That includes 174 million of plastic produce bags removed from fruit and veg aisles, 600 tonnes of unrecyclable polystyrene removed from branded food and drink products and 1,300 tonnes of plastic removed following the launch of paper carrier bags.

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