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Source: Packaging Gateway
This initiative is part of its comprehensive “4Rs” packaging strategy – remove, reduce, reuse, recycle – aimed at transforming its packaging impact.
Since 2019, Tesco’s “4Rs strategy” has laid the groundwork for achieving its 2025 objectives.
According to the latest Sustainability Report, over 2.5 billion pieces of plastic have been eliminated from its own-brand products since 2019, including lids, film, punnets, and bags.
In November 2024, Tesco shifted its Finest dried pasta range to paper packaging, successfully removing over 10 million plastic pieces each year.
Further initiatives under “reduce” include minimizing plastic in cheese packaging, juice cartons, frozen food bags, and multipack wrappings, resulting in significant material savings.
The “reuse” aspect involves Tesco exploring reusable systems, highlighted by its pilot program with Loop in selected stores.
For the “recycle” component, Tesco is striving for full recyclability of packaging, enhancing collection infrastructure, and advocating for clearer recycling policies.
As of early 2025, approximately 96 percent of Tesco’s own-brand packaging is recyclable, though kerbside recycling options may vary across regions.
To tackle recycling disparities, the company has established soft-plastic collection points in large UK stores, allowing customers to return items that local councils often do not recycle.
To date, over 2,000 tonnes of soft plastics have been collected, with some repurposed into products like school planters.
Tesco is also redesigning its packaging to aid recycling—replacing black plastic with colors such as green and brown to enhance sorting efficiency in recycling facilities.
Tesco recognizes that achieving industry-wide change and consistent regulations is crucial to meeting its 2025 targets. The company continues to advocate for a uniform recycling infrastructure throughout the UK, including an effective deposit return scheme and harmonized waste regulations.
Engaging suppliers is essential, as Tesco requires partners to adhere to its recyclability standards and adopt sustainable packaging solutions.
In addition to packaging goals, Tesco aims to halve food waste by the end of 2025 and redistribute 85 percent of unsold, safe-to-eat food to charities or for animal feed, collaborating with organizations like FareShare and Olio.
Tesco’s commitments reflect the rising concerns regarding plastic waste and the challenges of a circular economy. With 70 percent of UK plastic waste originating from packaging and millions of tonnes of food discarded each year, these efforts are pivotal to fostering greener grocery retail.
The focus on sustainable packaging, reduced plastic usage, and improved recycling initiatives may enhance consumer awareness and simplify the path to sustainable shopping.
Covestro has officially announced its participation in Kollert, a publicly funded, interdisciplinary research consortium in Germany dedicated to developing recyclable product concepts for automotive lighting, mechatronics, and electronic components.
Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) under the CircularGlowUp framework and supervised by the Karlsruhe Project Management Agency (PTKA), the three-year project runs from June 2026 to May 2029 with a total funding volume of €4.371 million.
The European Union’s landmark Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) has officially entered into application across all EU Member States. Establishing a single harmonized legal framework for the EU Single Market, the PPWR replaces fragmented national rules to streamline compliance for cross-border businesses, accelerate waste reduction, and lower reliance on imported virgin raw materials.
A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered a recyclable yarn made from polyethylene, offering a scalable solution to the global challenge of textile waste. Detailed in ACS Materials Letters, the research was led by Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, alongside first author SeongHyeon Kim and co-authors Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.
The MIT team demonstrated that garments crafted from the engineered yarn can be melted down at the end of their lifecycle and respun into fresh fiber or molded into solid plastic hardware, such as buttons and belt buckles.