Nestlé’s vision is that none of its packaging ends up in landfill or as litter.
This Global Recycling Day, Nestlé UK and Ireland is highlighting how it is improving its packaging to facilitate recycling and how it is supporting better waste management.
“We are making significant strides in reducing our overall packaging, ensuring it is designed for recycling while actively supporting investment in waste management infrastructure, and in including recycled materials in our packaging," said Sokhna Gueye, Head of Packaging at Nestlé UK and Ireland.
At the end of 2023, 83.5% of Nestlé’s plastic packaging globally was designed for recycling. UK and Ireland innovations in this area range from transitioning to mono material pouches in the Purina pet food range, to decreasing headspace across a range of confectionery products and transitioning Quality Street to recyclable paper packaging in 2022. Additionally, we are increasing our use of recycled materials, like achieving 100% recycled PET (rPET) across the BUXTON mineral water range and introducing up to 80% recycled plastics (using the mass balance approach) in our KitKat wrappers.
As well as packaging changes, there has been a lot of work with the recycling industry to invest in infrastructure to process packaging which can be hard to recycle. In 2023, Nestlé UK and Ireland announced investment in Impact Recycling’s new facility in Durham.
Sokhna said: “We have agreed to provide Impact Recycling with a £7 million loan to get its pioneering process at a new facility off the ground. The site is set to be operational this summer and will have the capacity to take 25,000 tonnes of this flexible plastic.
“This means the facility has the potential to recycle more than the amount of flexible plastic we place on the market. At Nestlé, we are dedicated to ensuring our packaging can have multiple lives and doesn't end up as waste in landfill. Supporting innovative technologies like this is just one of the many steps we are taking towards achieving this goal.”
In the UK and Ireland, Nestlé is driving forward to ensure as close to 100% of its packaging is designed to be recycled by the end of 2025 while continuing to work on making all of our packaging recyclable or reusable.
Sokhna added: “It is good to see how far we have come in making strides forward, however we are on a journey and we still have a lot more to do.”