Reduce egg-cessive waste this easter!

With around 90 million chocolate eggs eaten in Britain every year, there’s no surprise this amounts to around 8,000 tonnes of packaging waste every Easter. With consumers becoming more environmentally aware, there’s a growing demand from consumers for brands to crack down on the amount of packaging used for Easter eggs. Unfortunately, as Easter eggs are thin and easily breakable, brands tend to rely on multi-material packaging to protect the product. These typically come in a cardboard box, including a foil component, plastic window & internal plastic support which as a whole is unrecyclable in the current waste streams.

Examples of brands cutting down Easter packaging

With this in mind, it is no surprise we are increasingly seeing more brands cut down the volume of packaging Easter Eggs contain, let’s look at a few examples:

1. Cadbury has ditched 6 million plastic windows from display boxes and began redesigning cartons last year, putting a focus on using only sustainably sourced material.
2. Waitrose is halving single-use plastic on its own-brand Easter Eggs and packaging will now be made from recycled materials.
3. Aldi has removed its inner plastic packaging, which was originally in place to support the product.
4. Ikea has also introduced a flat-pack chocolate bunny Easter egg which comes in three pieces to be assembled, this minimises the overall volume of packaging and the bunny is made using only certified cacao from sustainable sources.

How to recycle your Easter egg packaging

• Cardboard – ensure you remove any plastic windows, fold them down and recycle them with paper and card.
• The plastic shell – usually made of PET – check for the recycling symbol and place it in your typical plastic recycling bin.
• Foil – this is widely recyclable, so scrunch and recycle. It’s best to collate foil together into a small ball, this helps avoid the material getting caught in recycling machinery.