Waitrose is the latest supermarket to wage a war on plastic, by removing the plastic wrapping that holds multibuy tins together.
Last year, it had a successful trial and is making the decision permanent. From now on, you can either buy loose cans or buy a cardboard sleeve of your favourite Waitrose tins.
It might not sound like a major move but it really is; Waitrose estimates that it’ll save 45 tonnes of plastic waste a year from ditching the wrapping. That’s massive.
‘Our customers expect us to keep tackling plastic, which includes eliminating single use shrink wrap on our multi-buys,’ said Claire Mitchell, canned food buyer at Waitrose & Partners.
‘This is a significant step towards our plan to phase out non-recyclable plastic from all our packaging by 2021.’
It’s not just the tins that are getting the nude treatment either; Waitrose Essential tissues will no longer be held together by wrapping – which will save a further 4.49 tonnes of plastic a year.
Of course, Waitrose isn’t the first supermarket to do this with their multi-buy cans. Tesco announced back in January that they were going to do the same, while Morrisons last month became the first supermarket to remove all plastic bags in favour of trialling reusable paper options.
Tesco’s commitment to ditching the wrapping means that a whopping 350 tonnes of plastic a year will be removed and it’s working with tin giants Heinz and Green Giant to ensure that even branded products are plastic-free.
A BBC report found that Tesco had by far the most pointless plastic packaging on branded and own-brand products in store, followed by Asda and Sainsbury’s. The supermarket with the least plastic? M&S.
The top eight UK supermarkets produce a huge amount of plastic waste, with the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace claiming that they were responsible for 58.3 billion pieces of plastic in 2019 alone.
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