21/05/2019 : As a founding member of The UK Plastics Pact, we’re committed to achieving 100% recyclability across our plastics packaging by 2025. And we’re already making good progress... in early 2019 we switched from using black to recyclable, clear plastic trays with a minimum 50% recycled content across our Mr Kipling cakes and pies, including national favourites Viennese Whirls and Cherry Bakewells. Today almost 70% of the plastics we use within our product packaging are recyclable.
Black plastic cannot currently be classified as widely recycled in accordance with On-Pack-Recycling-Label (OPRL) guidelines. Even though the black material used is recycled content and the black trays are recyclable, UK recycling centres do not currently have the optical sorting equipment needed to identify it, resulting in black trays often getting sent to landfill or incineration. So in January 2019, we made the decision to move away from black plastic across our Mr Kipling cakes and pies, a project that has removed 400 tonnes of black plastic from the UK market each year.
Our ambitious pledge on plastics also includes our commitment to eliminate problematic PVC and Polystyrene from our packaging by the end of 2020, and to reduce the volume of plastics we use in our packaging by 500 tonnes by 2025. That's on top of the 320 tonnes we’ve already removed over the last three years accumulatively. And we’ll continue to include OPRL on our packaging, with an aim to do so across 100% of our portfolio by the end of 2019, so consumers can better understand whether our product packaging can be recycled.
For more information about our position on plastic including our KPIs and our membership of The UK Plastics Pact, please click here.