Foodstuffs, the owners of New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square, has pledged to focus even more on reducing the impact of plastic packaging in our environment.
Steve Anderson, Managing Director Foodstuffs NZ says, “We were delighted to sign up to the New Zealand Plastic Packaging Declaration – it is a great way for us to cement our commitment to reducing waste throughout our business and our communities. We take our responsibility to the environment very seriously – and nowhere is this more evident than in our stores where we are making huge strides in reducing waste.”
Foodstuffs was the first retailer in New Zealand to introduce kerbside recyclable food trays containing 50% recycled PET; providing customers the opportunity to divert up to 80 million food trays from landfill every year. This change required the business to liaise with recyclers and Councils throughout New Zealand.
Trays collected at the kerbside are recycled in both New Zealand and Australia by innovative New Zealand companies like Flight Plastics. This great domestic circular economy sees Flight re-processing Foodstuffs’ rPET butchery trays into packaging used by both our Private label brands and produce suppliers, which then appear back in Foodstuffs’ stores.
Anderson says, “A key part of our pledge is to work with suppliers to help them transition to more sustainable packaging materials which contain recycled content and can be recycled themselves at kerbside or back at store.
“Foodstuffs offers a range of sustainable bags at checkout and has pledged to completely phase out single use plastic check out bags by the end of this year in New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square supermarkets.”
In addition, the business offers soft plastic recycling at the majority of their supermarkets and is working towards 100% availability. Foodstuffs stores account for 8 tonnes of soft plastics collected each week – with the top 10 stores by volume all being Foodstuffs supermarkets among the companies taking part.
Anderson confirms that, “As part of our commitment to the Plastic Packaging Declaration Foodstuffs will support the development of a circular economy for plastic by moving to specify recycled content in more of our packaging, and will work with industry partners to develop domestic markets for recovered plastics. 100% of our retail and private label packaging will be either reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025. We will encourage other companies, including all suppliers, to support the Declaration by making similar commitments.”
