McVitie’s Owner Extends Packaging Recycling Scheme with Terracycle : Digestive Maker: Potential to Recycle Billions of Biscuit Packets

The owner of biscuit maker McVitie’s, pladis UK&I, has said that billions of plastic wrappers could be reused in 2019 if Britain’s snack-lovers made a new year’s resolution to recycle through the company’s partnership with TerraCycle.

According to the company, which also owns the Jacob’s and go ahead! biscuit brands says that with 99.2% of households buying biscuits each year, a nation-wide effort to recycle all biscuit packaging would save almost 2.7 billion packs every year from ending up in landfill sites, without costing consumers a penny.

Although flexible plastic wrappers are not collected by local council services, pladis’ partnership with recycling experts TerraCycle enables consumers to effortlessly recycle the wrappers from their favourite treats.

Consumers can either send their wrappers to TerraCycle by freepost or drop them off at one of nearly 500 collection points around the country.

Since the partnership began in 2012, millions of biscuit and cake wrappers have been recycled and turned into items such as park benches and garden equipment.

pladis UK&I has now extended the TerraCycle partnership to the entire snacking range, including Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Mini Cheddars, which are popular snacks over the festive period.

To help the make the change, pladis and TerraCycle have released a video4, with accompanying instructions, showing how to turn old boxes of Jaffa Cakes into a mini-home wrapper recycling box.

The box is designed to provide a simple way to store plastic wrappers tidily, before they are sent for recycling with TerraCycle.

At the same time, pladis UK&I has announced a range of measures to reduce its environmental impact through plastic waste. The announcements, which mark a key milestone in the company’s long-term strategy to tackle plastic waste, include:

pladis UK&I has signed up to the UK Plastics Pact and is pledging to make all of its plastic packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025

pladis UK&I will be improving labelling to ensure consumers are clear on how and where to recycle their packaging

Scott Snell, Customer Vice-President at pladis UK&I, said: “During the festive period, we Brits consume 35 million more packs of biscuits than we do during the rest of the year,3 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 recognise 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.”

Tom Szaky, CEO and Founder of TerraCycle, said: “pladis has been a valued partner of TerraCycle 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 programme 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 Programme.”

Marcus Gover, CEO, WRAP, said: “We are delighted to have pladis UK and Ireland joining The UK Plastics Pact. Through our first-of-a-kind Pact we will work together with governments, citizens and business to transform the way we make, use and dispose of plastic so that we retain its value, particularly in reducing food and drink waste, but prevent it from polluting the environment.”

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