Biscuit and confectionary company pladis UK & Ireland has made an appeal to the British biscuit-lovers to make recycling their 2019 new year’s resolution by recycling their plastic biscuit wrappers through the company’s partnership with recycling experts TerraCycle.
Image: UK & Ireland has made an appeal to the British biscuit-lovers to make recycling their 2019 new year’s resolution. Photo: Courtesy of pladis global.
Pladis said that Britain is a nation of biscuit-lovers, with 99.2% of households buying biscuits each year and consuming 2.7 billion packs every year. Most of these packs come with a plastic packaging which could be recycled through the company’s TerraCycle partnership.
pladis UK&I has partnered with recycling experts TerraCycle for over six years to enable consumers to recycle the wrappers from their favorite treats.
The company claims that millions of biscuit and cake wrappers have been recycled and turned into items such as park benches and garden equipment, since the start of its partnership with TerraCycle in 2012.
Consumers are allowed to send their wrappers to TerraCycle either by freepost or drop them off at one of the nearby collection points. Nearly 500 collection points are installed across the country.
pladis UK&I customer vice president Scott Snell said: “During the festive period, we Brits consume 35 million more packs of biscuits than we do during the rest of the year, so it’s a really important time to start thinking about where all that waste goes.
“Today, we’re announcing our long-term strategy as well as some new commitments that will have an impact on our environmental footprint right now. We recognize this is an industry wide issue and we’ll be working closely with industry partners to tackle it. In the meantime, we are creating a solution by giving consumers the opportunity to stop wrappers going to landfill through this recycling scheme.”
pladis UK&I has extended its TerraCycle partnership covering entire snacking range including Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Mini Cheddars which are highly consumed snacks over the festive period.
pladis and TerraCycle have jointly released a video to help biscuit-lovers with showing how to turn old boxes of Jaffa Cakes into a mini-home wrapper recycling box. The box is designed to give a simple solution to store plastic wrappers tidily, before they are sent for recycling.
TerraCycle founder and CEO Tom Szaky said: “pladis has been a valued partner of TerraCycle’s for a number of years now in the UK and Ireland. Firstly for the biscuit wrapper category and more recently it was great to see them expand the program to cover the cracker and cake wrapper categories which was well received by consumers.
“We encourage consumers to help spread the message to friends and family that they can recycle their biscuit, cracker and cake packaging. They can do this by using one of 500 public drop off locations or signing up as a private collector on the pladis Biscuits and Snacks Recycling Program.”
pladis UK&I has announced a range of measures to reduce its environmental impact through plastic waste and mark a key milestone in the company’s long-term strategy to tackle plastic waste.
pladis UK&I said that it has joined the UK Plastics Pact and is pledging to make all of its plastic packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. It is expected to improve its labeling to ensure consumers are informed on how and where to recycle their packaging.