By removing coloured plastic and changing blue, red and green milk caps to a clear alternative – on around 425 million bottles of milk every year – Tesco is improving the quality of recovered material from household waste and enabling the cap to be recycled back into milk bottles. Customers are encouraged to squash or crush empty bottles, replacing the original lid before recycling to ensure it is not lost or discarded.
Coloured plastic currently needs to be processed separately from clear packaging, and so this simple change means that each year 3,900 extra tonnes of recycled plastic can go back into making new bottles, a process which can be repeated every time a customer recycles it.
The move will be seen in all Tesco stores, and across 4 pint, 2 pint and 1 pint bottles of milk. Different variants of milk – whole, semi-skimmed and skimmed – will still be clearly identifiable, thanks to coloured block labels around the main bottle.
