Words by Smiley Team
After the success of its refill counters installed in several shops across England, Waitrose is expanding its zero-packaging ranges to include even more products. For the second year in a row, their drive to reduce plastic waste has earnt the supermarket the top place on UK supermarket rankings from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace.
Waitrose has reduced its overall plastic waste by 6.1 per cent since 2017, the largest reduction out of all UK supermarkets.
To advance further, they will add unpacked items to its stores, becoming the first national supermarket to sell packing-free products from its regular isles. They will offer 51 lines, including frozen fruit, store cupboard essentials such as rice, pasta and grains, cereals, dried fruit, snacking and coffee, as well as washing detergent.
One of those behind the initiative, Waitrose executive director James Bailey, said: “We are pleased that Greenpeace’s league table has recognised our efforts to decrease our plastic packaging and pioneer unpacked shopping, but we realise there’s more to do. We know this remains as important to our customers as it does to us so we have continued to explore ways we can do more.
“Waitrose Unpacked requires a fundamental change in shopping behaviour that has been ingrained for years. This next phase will help us to understand if we can make refillable a routine part of customers’ shopping trips that would allow us to roll out Unpacked further in the future.”
The new packaging-free products build on their Unpacked range that evolved through a trial of refill stations built in their stores in Oxford, Wallingford, Abingdon and Cheltenham. Ten weeks after their launch, the stations proved a success; the majority of customers said they would shop from this range again, and nearly all of those using the station remembered to bring their own containers from home to fill with food.
But unpacked items only touches the surface of Waitrose’s efforts to reduce plastic waste. Setting an example for others, by 2023, all its own-label packaging will be widely recyclable, reusable or home compostable, with the aim to reduce single-use plastic by 50 per cent across the Waitrose own label by 2025. By 2030, they aim to halve food waste from their operations, supply chain and from customers’ households. Most ambitiously, they hope to increase the proportion of reusable and refillable packaging used across Waitrose own-label products by 50 per cent.
