Own brand cheese at Marks & Spencer will contain 33% recycled content for the near-future as long as there is enough post-consumer plastic content to produce it.
Saputo Dairy UK (SDUK) who supplies the cheese to M&S and also makes Cathedral City, Clover and Country Life dairy products, has worked with Wipak UK to develop the cheese packaging.
However, the products packaged with post-consumer plastic content are likely to only be available for a limited period due to a lack of enough material.
SDUK lead packaging manager Neil Richards said: “In 2020, we pledged to accelerate our global waste performance and announced clear targets to reduce our material use, increase the recycled or renewable content of our packaging and ensure that all of our packaging is either recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. This PCR project is a significant step towards helping us achieve this goal.
“Consumers are well aware of the environmental and social impacts of plastics, and, increasingly, the plastic content of a product is influencing buying habits.
“One of the greatest challenges to increasing the recycled content across plastic packaging is the availability of food-grade recycled plastics, so we were particularly pleased that Wipak UK was able to incorporate a PCR resin that not only preserved the look and feel of the previously used material, but maintained the integrity of the packs too.”
