Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
Every Monday, we publish a roundup of the top developments in plastics and sustainability – from regulatory changes to company news.
This week’s highlights:
- Major U.S. retailers including CVS Health, Target and Walmart have joined forces to pilot nine sustainable solutions to single-use plastic bags. The Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Plastic Bag, managed by Closed Loop Partners, will evaluate various factors and monitor the journey of reusable bag solutions, which don’t include landfills or oceans like single-use plastic bags. (Forbes)
- Supermarket chain Tesco is rolling out its ‘soft plastics’ packaging recycling scheme across all of its large stores in the UK, after a successful trial . The supermarket expects to collect more than 1,000 tonnes a year and will recycle as much of this material as possible back into products and packaging sold in Tesco stores. (Plastics in Packaging)
- Roughly 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic has been generated globally as of 2017, almost half through single-use plastic packaging. A new tool called the Understanding Packaging (UP) Scorecard measures commonly used foodware and food packaging materials with a single yardstick to provide companies with the information needed to make sustainable purchasing decisions. (Green Biz)
