RECYCLING

While our retailers have their own internal recycling practices, many of them also offer various recycling initiatives in which customers can participate. Here are a few examples of different ways you can contribute to recycling programs:

COLES

Ever wished you could recycle all your soft plastic bags, like bread bags, fruit and vegie bags, cereal box liners, rice and pasta packets, and frozen food bags? It always seems such a waste that you can’t put them in the normal Council recycling bin.

Well, Coles has a solution!

You can bring in your soft plastic bags to any of the 500 stores that participates in the REDcycle plastic bag and packaging program and place them in the specially marked bin at the front of the store. Coles recycles these plastic bags and turns them into outdoor furniture for Aussie primary schools and pre-school. Clever!

Other recycling initiatives Coles has taken include:

• Coles bottled water bottles are made from recycled plastic, saving 1.9 million kgs of plastic a year
• Plantic eco-plastic for packaging Coles Brand fresh beef, pork and lamb mince combines the use of renewable corn and recyclable plastic material to create a meat pack that is suitable to go in your recycling bin at home.
• Programs to recycle or divert food, cardboard and plastic resulted in converting more than 3000 tonnes of organic material to energy, and donating more than 7.8 million kilograms of food via its partnership with SecondBite and Foodbank.
• Customers are encouraged to use reusable bags and reduce their number of single-use plastic bags. A number of different reusable bags are available for purchase at Coles, and once they have reached the end of their lifecycle, these bags can be recycled at Coles.

Check out the Coles website for more information or come in to our Coles store.
 

WOOLWORTHS

Woolworths is working towards positively influencing its retail supply chain to become more sustainable and reduce its carbon footprint. 

Woolworths has several organic produce suppliers who have recently adopted recycled packaged and it has completed the total elimination of polystyrene trays from its produce organics supply network, converting to compostable trays or recyclable plastic. Woolworths continues to work with all of its suppliers to actively pursue packaging alternatives that reduce the amount of packaging or increasing its recyclability where possible.

Moving towards a target of zero food waste to landfill, many diversion programs have been implemented, including food donation to farmers and food rescue charities like OzHarvest, FoodBank and SecondBite, as well as commercial food recycling and the new end-to-end stock-loss initiative ‘Fresher Faster’.

Woolworths partners with the REDcycle recycling program to provide customers with a way to recycle the soft plastic bags that packages many frozen products and bakery items (which cannot be recycled via Australia’s regular recycling program), to keep it out of landfill and dispose of it responsibly. REDcycle collects the plastic from dedicated bins at the front of 100 Woolworths' Supermarkets in Sydney and Melbourne and sends it to an Australian processor to make plastic park furniture. Since it began the partnership in 2015, it has disposed of 190 tonnes of plastic this way, equivalent to 47.6 million pieces of packaging! 
 
Find out more on the Woolworths website or shop at our Woolworths store.

Discover how to Shop Better, Do Better, Feel Better here.