Recycled plastic food trays for Tesco

Tesco has started using recycled PET packaging for its core, chilled ready-meals.

The tray-to-tray intiative with Faerch Group will use customer-recovered PET trays collected via European kerbside waste that are recycled and converted back to food-grade plastic trays.

The supermarket giant says that ready-meal trays already contain up to 75% recycled content, mainly from bottle-flake plastic but the new Tray 2 Tray programme with include a minimum of 30% recycled tray content in its core, chilled ready-meals.

The initiative will be rolled from April 2023 and completed across the range of core ready meals by the end of Summer 2023. The company aims to make this change across all of its ready-meal products and says that by 2025 all Tesco packaging will be fully recyclable.

Adele Kearns, Packaging Development Manager at Tesco, says, 'We are determined to close the loop on our packaging – for it to be fully recyclable and contain recycled content wherever possible.'