Tesco Swaps Milk Bottle Lids to Improve Plastic Recycling

Tesco customers will notice some changes across the store branded milk cartons. The supermarket is working with suppliers to make recycling milk bottles easier for customers.

The supermarket chain will be removing the colored plastic caps that are currently red, blue, and green and switching them to a clear alternative, a change which will impact 425 million bottles of milk a year. By doing this, Tesco is improving the quality of recovered material from household waste and making it so that milk bottle caps can be recycled back into milk bottles.

Currently, colored plastic is processed separately from clear packaging. With this simple change, an extra 3,900 tonnes of recycled plastic can go back into making new bottles.

All Tesco stores will implement this change across different amounts of milk. Different variants of milk will still be able to be identified because of the colored labels around the main bottle.

“Ensuring our packaging is as sustainable as possible is really important to us, and customer feedback on our trial of these new clear milk caps has been overwhelmingly positive. We will continue to look for ways to improve the packaging of our products and make it even easier for customers to recycle at home,” said James Waddy, Category Director for Dairy.

Tesco has successfully removed approximately 2.2 billion pieces of plastic from its UK business.

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