Sainsbury's has launched a new recycling scheme for flexible plastic packaging in 520 of its stores, including in Bishop's Stortford, to recycle the likes of coffee bags, food pouches, biscuit wrappers and crisp packets

Louise Tennekoon writes about environmental matters from a Bishop's Stortford perspective...

If you open up my black bin, you'll discover my secret eco-shame: plastic food packaging. Salad bags, biscuit wrappers, plastic lids from fish trays and strawberry boxes, cheese wrap. You get the picture.

We try to reduce our reliance on single-use plastics but still, there they are, in my bin. In an ideal world we would be feasting on garden-grown veg, homemade pittas, weekly batches of home-baked biscuits and my kids wouldn't eat crisps. But we live in the real world and I know I am not alone. The UK produces over 300,000 tonnes of this waste a year, but only recycles 6% of it.

So I was excited to see that Sainsbury's has launched a new recycling scheme for flexible plastic packaging in 520 of its stores (including here in Bishop's Stortford). They want all those things that have previously been lurking unloved in my bin, even coffee bags, food pouches, biscuit wrappers and crisp packets.

Sounds great, but is this a scheme we can trust? Is the waste going to be recycled or is it going to end up polluting a river or a beach somewhere?

Since China banned imports of plastic waste in 2017, most of our plastic recycling ends up in Turkey (over 200,000 tonnes of the stuff last year and this year's figures look set to be even higher). But Turkey can't cope. It only recycles 12% of its waste. Earlier this year, Greenpeace found plastic waste from UK retailers dumped, burned, piled up and left to spill into the sea in Turkey. Our government is under pressure to ban the export of all plastic waste, but at the moment we lack the recycling infrastructure to handle it in the UK.

This is where the new scheme steps in. Sainsbury's is part of the Flexible Plastics Fund (FPF) which brings together global brands (including Unilever, Mars, PepsiCo and Mondelez, the owner of Cadbury), retailers and recyclers, with the aim of stimulating high-quality recycling of flexible plastics in the UK.

Here's the technical bit: companies are legally required to recycle a percentage of their packaging, in line with annual targets. Rather than trying to recover and recycle their own plastic waste, they meet their obligation by buying packaging recovery notes (PRNs) from recyclers. These notes guarantee that an equivalent amount of packaging has been recycled.

Historically, the price of PRNs for flexible plastics was low because they were hard to recycle and there wasn't much of a market for them. There was no incentive for recyclers to develop the infrastructure to handle them and no point in collecting them for recycling, which is why they ended up in landfill or in the environment.

The FPF sets a guaranteed minimum price for flexible plastic PRNs, giving recyclers the confidence to invest in jobs, machinery and technology to process them. The fund only pays for the PRNs when the final recycled product has been produced (rather than when the plastics are collected) and pays more for higher quality products. Recyclers can earn more for recycling food wrapping into more food wrapping than for using it to make a lower grade item.

Crucially, the fund is designed to stimulate recycling right here in the UK. It aims to recycle at least 80% of the plastics collected in the UK (with the rest sent to approved processors in Europe), rising to 100% by 2023. This seems a pretty ambitious target, but it depends on how much plastic is collected. New research suggests that 95% of people are willing to recycle their flexible plastics, but, at the moment, Sainsbury's and the Co-Op are the only retailers to have rolled collection points out nationally. Waitrose is running a trial across 37 stores.

The ultimate goal of the fund is to create a fully circular recycling model, in which all plastic wrapping put on the market is collected and recycled into more flexible plastic, eliminating waste.

There is one danger with this, and it's a big one. The scheme could become a licence – for us and for the big brands – to go on using more and more plastic packaging, reassuring ourselves that 'it's okay, it'll be recycled'. This would create more, rather than less, demand for new plastic.

So, the FPF only really adds environmental value if it's in the context of an overall plastics reduction strategy. Sainsbury's gets this: it was the first supermarket to commit to cutting plastic packaging from branded and own-brand goods by 50% by 2025.

I am more sceptical when it comes to the big brands involved in the fund. They all rank among the top 10 worst plastic polluters globally, with PepsiCo alone generating a staggering 2.3 million tonnes of plastic waste a year. They have taken some baby steps to reduce packaging on some product lines, but it's small beer so far. These companies have a long way to go to look serious on plastics reduction (although Unilever does stand out for its robust targets).

As Friends of the Earth plastics campaigner Camilla Zerr points out, recycling is welcome but: "[It] shouldn't take priority over the urgent need to reduce the amount of plastic waste produced in the first place. Over 80% of Brits want refillable products to be easier to buy and more widely available – something the Government and businesses must make a top priority. The Government has to show greater urgency too, by setting targets to reduce the amount of unnecessary plastic produced in the UK each year."

As for me, I decided to celebrate the launch of the scheme by clearing out my hoard of plastic bags which built up over lockdown, as shown on this page. This is just what could already be recycled at supermarkets even before the launch of this scheme.

Going through the pile was a great prompt for me to think about my own plastics reduction strategy. Some of it seems unavoidable (frozen veg and Quorn packs), but some of it I can definitely cut down on. I'll be taking my own string veg bags and a cotton bread bag along with me when I do my shopping (I just picked a bread bag up for £3.99 from newlivingstore.co.uk).

I know it's not the whole answer, but I will be supporting the scheme as it will only work if we use it. The downside is now I need a new, separate container and then I've got to retrain the family...