Tesco and Sainsbury’s have been accused of misleading their customers over their front-of-store recycling schemes. The accusation comes after an investigation found that most soft plastic returned to stores was burned. The Everyday Plastic campaign group and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA UK) tracked 40 bundles of soft plastic waste – such as single-use bags, films and wrapping – through supermarket take-back schemes across England.
Shoppers can drop off soft plastic packaging – which cannot currently be recycled through kerbside collections – at the stores so they can be recycled by the retail giants instead. But Everyday Plastic said volunteers placed Apple tracking devices in 40 bundles of plastic packaging that were then dropped at Sainsbury’s and Tesco collection points across England. The bundles were tracked after they left the stores from July 2023 to February 2024 and collectively travelled more than 25,000km across the UK and overseas, the campaigners said.
Out of the trackers known to have reached a final destination, seven were found to have been turned into fuel pellets, which are commonly used by industry such as in cement kilns. Five were burned for energy, four were downcycled into lower value plastic products overseas, mostly in Turkey, and just one was downcycled in the UK, the investigators said. Eight of the tracked bundles were found to have been sent overseas and 70% of the bundles that reached a known destination were burned for.
