A north London supermarket has become Britain’s first to introduce plastic-free zones, in a move campaigners believe will spur the giant chains to follow suit.
Thornton Budgens in Belsize Park has converted more than 1,700 product lines to non-plastic packaging over the past 10 weeks, part of a journey that promises to take the store “virtually plastic-free” within three years.
Supported by local resident celebrities Jim Broadbent and Dame Janet Suzman, the supermarket claims to have becoming a “public experiment” in how to retail food more sustainably.
It follows the introduction of the world’s first plastic-free aisle to a Dutch supermarket in Amsterdam last February.
However, the scale of ambition in the London store is grander, with everything from vegetables, crisps and cheese, to wild game meat such as squirrel offered in non-plastic packaging
Thursday’s official launch comes the week after Philip Hammond announced he would introduce a tax on so-called virgin plastic in the Budget.
If follows growing global concern about the damage inflicted by single-use plastic items on marine life, heightened in part by David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series, which aired last year.
Andrew Thornton, who owns the Budgens franchise, said: “We’re hoping that what we’re doing here will challenge the likes of Sainsbury’s, Tesco and others.
As soon as one of them turns round to the big producers such as Coca-cola, Heinz or Unilever and says “unless you stop sending us products in plastic, we’re not going to stock them”, change will come very quickly.
For many products, plastic packaging has been replaced by old-fashioned looking paper bags made from cellulose, a structural component of the cell walls of green plants.
Meanwhile for the store’s 300 different cheeses, a new wax packaging has had to be developed.
Mr Thornton told The Daily Telegraph that sales dipped initially as customers were put off by not being able to see the cheese, however a new transparent non-plastic wrapping was found which solved the problem.
Sian Sutherland, co-founder of the campaign group A Plastic Planet, which is working with Thornton Budgens, said the transition was being aided by “challenger” producers more instinctively comfortable with packaging their produce in non-plastic.
“It’s the big brands that are like snails with their pace of change,” she said.
“What we are doing is an open door for new packaging technology.”
Among the newly presented products on offer this week is the UK’s first non-plastic pre-packaged bacon.
In his budget speech Mr Hammond told MPs he was, for the time being, resisting calls to introduce a so-called “latte levy” – a tax on coffee cups – and focussing instead on plastic packaging.
The Government is to consult on imposing a tax on food and drink companies using plastic packaging that does not include at least 30 per cent recycled content.
The measure is intended to target in particular virgin plastics that are nearly impossible to recycle such as some food trays and plastic straws.
Ms Sutherland said the success of Thornton Budgets would give the lie to claims that progress on plastics can only be made incrementally.
“We’re going to be a living, working lab,” she said.
“All the other supermarkets can look and learn from what we’re doing.”
“We have converted 1,700 product lines in just ten weeks, but that’s just the beginning.”
