MORRISONS has announced the acquisition of a ‘significant’ stake in a new recycling site in Fife.
It added that the move will make it the first supermarket to own its own recycling operations.
Based in Fife, the facility is co-owned and constructed by recycling plant specialists, Yes Recycling.
It will turn hard-to-recycle flexible food packaging into plastic flakes, pellets and boards. At current capacity, the site will take 15,000 tonnes of flexible plastic packaging a year.
The hard-to-recycle soft plastic – including chocolate wrappers, crisp packets and food film – will be sent to the site from Morrisons’ distribution sites and by Cireco Scotland, which processes kerbside collection material.
Jamie Winter, procurement director at Morrisons, said, “Lots of work has been done by retailers to reduce plastic, but little to recycle what remains. We’re taking on that challenge and making a significant investment in a state-of-the-art soft plastic recycling site.
“It’ll take problematic plastics, recycle them here in the UK, and give them a new life. And by 2025 we want to increase our capability to be able to recycle and reuse the equivalent amount of plastic we put out on to the market within our own facilities.”
Omer Kutluoglu, co-owner of Yes Recycling, added, “This is a ground-breaking site which uses new patented plastic recycling technology, which we’ve developed over the last seven years. It is a blueprint for the future and will help to kick-start the UK’s plastics recycling industry. It will mean we can keep plastic in our own country’s ‘circular economy’ and out of our seas and oceans.”
