Report highlights challenge Tesco faces to show trail of soft-plastic recycling
The challenge of accounting for the recycling of soft plastics has been highlighted in a recent investigation.
In an article titled ‘A Plastic Bag’s 2,000-Mile Journey Shows the Messy Truth About Recycling’, Bloomberg reported on the journey of three digital trackers placed inside plastic items and deposited in Tesco’s recycle collection bins. Notably, according to the investigation, one digital tracker showed up at a Turkish domestic waste processing site, weeks after being deposited in store.
The trackers were placed into typical soft plastic items that the Tesco scheme collects – a clear vegetable wrap, a lentil puff pouch and a Tesco-branded bag. Although the vegetable wrap’s tracker disappeared in London, the other two ended up in Poland, 700 miles from the UK and the front-of-store collection bins in Tesco.
The report reveals that the lentil puff pouch’s tracker continued to a recycling plant in the town Zielona Góra, Poland, belonging to Tesco’s waste management partner Eurokey. According to Bloomberg, the mayor of Zielona Góra, Janusz Kubicki, claims his office is in a legal dispute with Eurokey due to the company breaching the terms of its licence for waste storage. The lentil puff pouch tracker concluded its journey in a factory in East Poland, run by Stella Pack SA, which manufactures plastic bags.
Soft plastic is regularly sent to Eurokey’s sorting centre in Poland as part of Tesco’s soft plastic recycling scheme, the supermarket told letsrecycle.com, as ‘sufficient infrastructure’ to sort the material does not yet exist in the UK.
Two months after the investigation began, the Tesco-branded bag’s tracker was located in Southern Turkey at recycling company IMO Plastik’s facility. A manager on site told Bloomberg they had purchased plastics from Europe, of which they hoped to recover 90 per cent. When the Bloomberg organisation later contacted IMO Plastik, they stated: “the same manager denied accepting exports and said his company only dealt with Turkish domestic waste.”
According to Tesco, soft plastic is regularly sent to Eurokey’s sorting centre in Poland, as part of Tesco’s soft plastic recycling scheme, because the UK does not have sufficient reprocessing infrastructure.
Commenting on the report a Tesco spokesperson told Resource: “We believe no plastic packaging should end up as waste in the natural environment. Soft plastic packaging plays an important role in prolonging the shelf-life of some products and preventing food waste, so we can’t currently get rid of it altogether.
“There are many challenges associated with recycling soft plastic materials and it is precisely because soft plastics are hard to recycle, and are not recycled by the vast majority of councils in the UK, that we introduced our soft plastic recycling points at our stores to prevent it otherwise going to landfill. We take any allegations that suggest the waste we send for recycling is going to landfill very seriously and while we have not been presented with evidence of this, we are undertaking our own audit of the supplier.”
Speaking to Resource, a spokesperson from Eurokey added: “Eurokey is a specialist reprocessing service provider focused on non-contaminated plastics and other recyclable materials. As part of our consumer flexible film recycling trial, all the material we collect is sent for reprocessing in our wholly owned and operated facilities in Poland which meet the standards set by the UK and Polish environmental authorities.
“Our role is to maximise the value of recyclable plastic by bringing to market high-grade material that can be used to manufacture new products. The material that we manage is tracked from the point of collection and dispatched by licensed waste carriers until it reaches an accredited reprocessing facility. The consumer recycling trial has demonstrated a negligible impact to the quality of the material we bring to market; only a very small percentage is determined to be non-recyclable and goes to waste to energy or an approved reprocessor. We do not claim PERN’s on any material that is non-recyclable. We do not send any material to landfill.”
Recycling soft plastic
‘Soft’ plastics are lightweight plastics that are not typically recycled at home, such as crisp packets, single-use carrier bags and bags-for-life, and biscuit wrappers. Tesco first rolled out a network of recycling points for soft plastics in March 2021. In an announcement, the retailer stated: “The recycling points will have the capacity to take soft (or non-rigid) plastic – which is usually non-recyclable – such as cling film, pet food pouches, crisp packets and bread bags, regardless of where it was bought from”.
It was announced in August 2021 that Tesco’s soft plastic collection service would be rolled out nationally, in response to significant customer support of the initial recycling points. Tesco commented that as much material as possible will be recycled back into its own products and packaging, with the service expected to see ‘the collection of over 1000 tonnes of plastic per year’. In a sample released in August 2021, Tesco stated that it would be able to recover over 80 per cent of the soft plastic returned by customers.
Tesco is not alone in its development of in-store soft plastic recycling schemes. In July 2021, Co-op launched its recycling schemes for plastic bags and product wrapping.
