Monday 20 September 2021

Morrisons to launch six ‘zero waste’ stores in Edinburgh

Morrisons has announced plans to launch six “zero waste” stores in Edinburgh in the move towards recycling all of the waste it creates by 2025.

The trial will include a partnership with Nestlé to collect and recycle all hard-to-recycle soft plastics for the first time in the UK.

Store waste will comprise of soft and hard plastics, cardboard, food waste, green waste, PPE, tins, cans and foils, which will be sorted in its warehouse and collected by a range of specialist waste partners for recycling in the UK.

Customer waste will include confectionary wrappers and pet food pouches, yoghurt tubs, mixed materials like crisp tubes and coffee pods and specialist products such as ink cartridges and batteries.

They will be collected at new dedicated collection points located in Morrisons' zero waste store foyers, before being collected for recycling.

If the trial is successful, the zero waste store format will be rolled out to all of Morrisons 498 stores over the next year.

Jamie Winter, Sustainability Procurement Director at Morrisons said: “We’re not going to reach our ambitious targets through incremental improvements alone. Sometimes you need to take giant steps and we believe that waste is one of those areas. We believe that we can, at a stroke, enable these trial stores to move from recycling around 27% of their general waste to over 84% and with a clear line of sight to 100%.

“We all need to see waste as a resource to be repurposed and reused. The technology, creativity and will exists - it's a question of harnessing the right process for the right type of waste and executing it well. And all waste collected in our stores will be recycled here in the UK - we will not reprocess anything abroad. If we’re successful, we’ll roll this zero waste store concept out across the UK as fast as we can.”