Stores ‘flood’ homes with plastic rubbish

BRITISH households are bringing home an average of 38 pieces of plastic packaging every week in the form of supermarket shopping, research has found.

The UK’S top seven food retailers are responsible for putting 59 billion pieces of plastic into circulation each year, which is more than 2,000 for every household, according to figures from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and

Greenpeace UK. The leading supermarkets are also producing 1.1 billion single-use bags, almost one billion “bags for life” and 1.2billion plastic produce bags for fruit and vegetables.

However, despite this alarming environmental footprint, half of the grocery retailers surveyed, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, have no specific targets for reducing plastic waste.

Sarah Baulch, the EIA’S senior ocean campaigner, said: “Decisions taken by supermarkets today are resulting in thousands of plastic items flooding British homes every year.

“Waste from the UK impacts on wildlife and communities around the world and it is high time that supermarkets move beyond incremental change and fundamentally rethink their relationship with single-use plastic packaging.”

In Britain, the grocery sector is the largest user of plastic packaging, accounting for more than half of the 1.5million tons of consumer plastic packaging used in retail every year.

But only around one third is recycled, with most ending up in landfill, being incinerated or finding its way into the environment.

The report showed that Tesco produced the highest amount of plastic, some 261,204 tons of single-use packaging annually, followed by Sainsbury’s with 119,764 tons and Morrisons with 100,155 tons.

When market share was taken into account, Iceland had the highest footprint with more than 14,000 tons per one per cent market share, and Aldi was second, with just under 12,000 tons. At the other end of the scale, the Co-op’s footprint was around 4,700 tons, followed by Waitrose with 6,280 tons.