Press releases

• Two of the leading global plastics organisations to work together to end plastic pollution

• Welsh trials find new uses for ‘difficult to recycle’ items by turning ‘waste’ into new products.
• Coffee cups and crisp packets become decking, recycled polypropylene goes into food waste caddies and medical containers.
• Industry standards updated as a result of the successful incorporation of recycled plastics in sharps containers.

On day two of the UK’s annual Food Waste Action Week (Tuesday 8 March), Resources and Waste Minister Jo Churchill joined Vince Kelly, culinary lecturer at Westminster Kingsway College and Guardians of Grub Ambassador and Catherine David, Director of Collaboration and Change at WRAP for a special tutorial to tackle the most wasted foods in the home

• With UK households wasting on average the equivalent of eight meals a week, (87,000 tonnes of food waste across all households in seven days), TV presenter Gregg Wallace joins Food Waste Action Week to help households get on top of food waste and spread the message Wasting Food Feeds Climate Change.
• To launch the week, Love Food Hate Waste will be revealing a shocking new installation showing the scale of UK household food waste from one single household over one year in the form of a 10ft food waste planet.**
• New survey finds the UK freezers contain UFOs (*unidentified frozen objects) with over a third of people admitting their freezer is sometimes a total disaster, and extremely hard to work out the contents. 19% of people threw away something frozen in the past two weeks because it has laid dormant for too long.
• Food Waste Action Week goes global with Weeks running simultaneously in Canada, the USA, South Africa, Australia and Mauritius.

• New research and recommendations from WRAP signal the end of unnecessary plastic packaging and Best Before labels on a wide range of fresh uncut fruit and vegetables in the UK.

• Evidence shows that selling fresh produce loose and removing date labels could prevent 14 million shopping baskets worth of food from going to waste and 1,100 rubbish trucks of avoidable plastic simply by allowing people to buy what they need.
• WRAP calls for removal of more unnecessary and problematic single use plastic items under The UK Plastics Pact, including wrapping on multi-packs of tinned food and sauce sachets in restaurants. 

• WRAP brings together more than 100 food and drink organisations to develop the definitive measurement framework for consistent scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reporting in food and drink
• WRAP’s Scope 3 Measurement and Reporting Protocols for UK Food and Drink Businesses to publish later this year
• Industry needs help - Scope 3 emissions account for up to 90% of all emissions in the food and drink sector for a typical business

WRAP and Behaviour Change to work together to scale up interventions that can help hit net zero goal through people power. 45% of UK emissions arise from the products we use and how we use them – behavioural change is a vital part of reaching net zero.

• WRAP has forged a unique industry partnership with Asda and Unilever to help citizens adopt refill and re-use as part of their weekly shop  
• The research will help combat plastic pollution and drive progress towards reducing plastic packaging; a key target of The UK Plastics Pact
• WRAP’s newly published Plastics Tracker Report shows two in three (67%) UK citizens say plastic waste is an important issue to them personally but acting on it can be challenging when shopping

• 45% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions relate to the things we buy, how we use them, and how we dispose of them – from food to fashion.
• By recycling, re-using items and cutting food waste, WRAP shows how we can give back to the environment this Christmas.

• UK Plastics Pact members have reduced problematic single-use plastic items by 46% and reduced the amount of packaging on supermarket shelves by 10% in the period 2018-2020.
• Recycled content has doubled in two years through Pact action, saving 140,000 tonnes of CO₂e.
• Although in 2021 we’ve seen substantial roll-out of front-of-store collections and investments in recycling plants, much more action is needed to deliver a step change in the proportion of plastic packaging that is recyclable – still sitting at 65%, raising to 70% when including reusable plastic packaging.
• 70% reduction in components that make packaging hard to recycle such as PVC sleeves.
• The UK Plastics Pact Annual Report video here.