Tesco is switching from coloured to clear caps across 425m bottles of own-brand milk per year to help customers recycle more easily at home.
As the blue, red and green milk caps currently need to be processed separately from clear packaging, the change allows the leading retailer to improve the quality of recovered material from household waste and enables the new cap to be recycled back into milk bottles.
As a result, 3,900 extra tonnes of recycled plastic can go back into making new bottles each year, a process which can be repeated every time a customer recycles it.
Other retailers including Asda, Aldi, Lidl and One Stop have also made the switch to cleal milk bottle caps over the past year in a bid to reduce plastic waste.
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Meanwhile, Tesco is encouraging shoppers to squash or crush empty bottles and replace the original lid before recycling, to ensure it is not lost or discarded.
The move will be rolling out in all Tesco stores across four, two and one pint bottles of milk.
However, different variants such as whole, semi-skimmed and skimmed will still be clearly identifiable by coloured block labels around the main bottle.
Tesco category director for dairy, James Waddy, said: “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.”
This follows previous initiatives by the supermarket giant which has seen it remove around 2.2bn pieces of plastic from its UK business.
Most recently, Tesco swapped out its traditional tray wrap packs of fresh mince for new ‘pillow packs’ that use 70% less plastic.
