MOSCOW (MRC) -- UK supermarket chain Tesco has announced it will start collecting flexible plastics packaging at all of its large stores nationwide after a successful trial earlier in the year, said Circularonline.
The supermarket first trialled in-store collections for soft and flexible plastics at ten stores in 2020, during which customers returned more than ten times the expected amount of plastic.
Then, this March, Tesco began adding the recycling points to 171 stores across Wales and the South West of England.
Tesco has now announced that it has added the facility to every large UK store, following further positive feedback from customers. When those using the 171 stores in Wales and the South-West were polled, 85% said the facility helped them to recycle more than they would have done otherwise, with the majority finding it convenient to use.
Plastics collected by Tesco are washed and sorted before being directed to a recycler. Most of the collected material is made into new products and packaging and Tesco has vowed that material that cannot be reprocessed in this way will be kept out of landfill, primarily through energy-from-waste systems.
During the initial trials in 2020, collected plastics were used to make food-grade packaging for Tesco own-brand cheeses. In a recent sample, 80% of the plastic collected was recycled and 20% was sent to energy-from-waste generation facilities.
Packaging formats that will be recycled under the scheme include bread bags, crisp packets, salad bags and sweet wrappers. Tesco is anticipating that it will collect and recycle around 1,000 tonnes of plastics annually under the scheme.
As MRC informed earlier, LyondellBasell Industries N.V. (Rotterdam the Netherlands) announced another step towards its ambition to advance the circular economy by making virgin quality polymers from raw materials derived from plastic waste at its Wesseling, Germany. Produced by the thermal conversion of plastic waste, this raw material is converted into ethylene and propylene in the LyondellBasell production facilities, and then processed into polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) in the downstream units for plastics production.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC