Come on Tesco and Sainsbury – Play your Part in Recycling Crisp Packets!

As you may have read in my previous post about the challenges of recycling crisp packets, I am pleased that Terracycle have set up a scheme to recycle crisp packets but I hoped that there would be more community collection points set up in my local area.

So I asked the local supermarkets.

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I asked the Supermarkets

I considered that their stores would be an ideal location for purchasers and consumers of crisps to recycle the packets … and I was also interested to find out their attitude to recycling in general.

This is the response I received:

Sainsbury’s Reply

Thanks very much for your email, I have forwarded your query to our comms team who have come back to me and said;

Terracycle recycling points isn’t something we currently offer in stores, we have logged your feedback with the relevant team and will be taken into consideration at the next regular review.

Our stores have facilities to recycle carrier bags and some have other recycling facilities outside which can vary by store.

Email received from Sainsburys Customer Service 19/02/2019

As I’m sure you will agree this is not really a very encouraging response!

Tesco’s Reply

Thank you very much for getting in touch with us.

The Terracycle Collection Scheme is a fantastic idea, I have just looked at their website and it is great way to reduce plastic waste.  We do have recycling channels in a lot of our stores already, however this I feel would make a great supplement to what we already do at the moment as crisps are readily used most of the time and customers tend to put them in general waste when facilities like this are not available. I have forwarded this on to our marketing team, hopefully this will be something that we can take part in the future.

Thank you very much for letting me know about this and please if you have any other suggestions, please do not hesitate to get in touch

Email received from Tesco Customer Services 19/02/2019

This is a much more positive reply even though there is no definite decision, timescale or offer to keep me informed of their progress.

Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

I Asked My Local Council

I saw that a local council about 30 miles away have set up a collection point in the Town Hall so I asked my council if they could do the same in my town. After all, the council offices is a central point, easily accessible for most people.

This is the reply I received:

Good morning,

I have made a report of your email enquiry to the depot and they will be in contact with a response.

Kind regards,

Reply from local council 03/06/2019

‘Depot’? Which depot? No signature on the email. It possibly sounds like the ‘depot’ is the local tip. I had hoped they would set up a collection point nearer to the centre of town rather than expecting people to drive out to a tip and ‘recycling centre’ with their haul of crisp packets. However I would settle for this, but sadly no further response has been received to date from the local council.

I’ve given them three weeks to respond and now I’ve emailed them again. And still we wait.

What You Can Do?

Log onto Terracycle to see where your local collection points are, or join one of their schemes.

Apathy

If you too find apathy from your local councils and supermarkets, please lobby them yourselves.

Lobby supermarkets to get involved and do their part in recycling the packaging of the products that they sell and profit from.

If you have more success than me, please leave me a comment below.

Thanks for reading!

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