We are happy to announce the complete removal of black plastic from all of its own brand food and drink packaging.
All of our own brand products will no longer be produced using black plastic. The move accounts for almost 4,000 tonnes of plastic being made more easily recyclable – that’s 7.4% of the plastic used at Morrisons each year, and represents an important step in our efforts to make all packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.
One of the areas benefitting most from the change our ready meal range, which has moved from black plastic packaging to a recyclable plastic which contains 85% recycled content.
Conventional black plastic packaging is coloured using carbon black pigments which mean it’s invisible to optical sorting equipment at plastic recovery and sorting facilities, resulting in the packaging either being disposed of in landfill or incinerated.
This is our latest announcement on reducing plastics as we have already removed 9,000 tonnes of unnecessary or problematic plastic each year. This figure includes 174m plastic produce bags removed from fruit and veg aisles, 600 tonnes of unrecyclable polystyrene removed from branded food and drink products and a further 1,300 tonnes of plastic being removed as a result of the launch of our paper carrier bags.
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.”
