Closed Loop targets food packaging from offices

Office workers in four major cities are to receive leaflets as part of a direct mail campaign informing them of the environmental benefits of recycling, and offering them the opportunity to recycle sandwich wrappers, soft drinks bottles and salad trays which are generally thrown away.

Closed Loop will then arrange for collections, with the long-term ambition to secure all the plastic bottles collected in the scheme for its Dagenham recycling facility, which is capable of reprocessing 35,000 tonnes of plastic bottles back into food packaging material.

The initiative, which has been sponsored Marks and Spencer and disposable packaging manufacturer Solo Cup Europe, is currently available to workers in Greater London, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, with Closed Loop hopeful of extending it nationwide by 2010.

Chris Dow, managing director of Closed Loop, said: “Recycling at work is lagging behind recycling in the home. Not only is this inefficient and uneconomic for businesses, it is detrimental to the environment as waste that can easily be recycled often ends up in landfill. Our office recycling and collection scheme offers a simple solution to that.”

Scheme

As part of the Closed Loop scheme, businesses will be issued a recycling sack which Closed Loop arranges for waste contractors to collect on a regular basis dependent on company needs. The company said that an office of 20 people generating approximately five bags of waste a week would be charged around £5 to join.

Closed Loop will act as coordinators for the project, and serve as a point of contact for businesses, with local contractors collecting the waste and delivering it to local facilities, with collections either source separated or commingled, depending on the offices' preference and also the availability of nearby facilities to process the materials.

Closed Loop claims that 80% of food packaging waste generated in offices is recyclable, with the collections targeting salad trays and HDPE and PET plastic drinks bottles.

The scheme will also collect plastic sandwich wrappings but, dependent on the polymer type, these are likely to be exported.

Interest

According to a spokeswoman for Closed Loop Recycling, there has been a great deal of interest in the scheme so far, with that expected to increase in the wake of the direct mail campaign.

She told letsrecycle.com: “There has been a big response so far, Closed Loop has had over 250 enquiries that have been followed up on and provided with quotes. Different sized businesses are signing up from quite small to medium size, with people signing up to it for different reasons, such as having to pay for residual waste collections to be taken away anyway.”

Despite the involvement of Marks and Spencer, the collection is not limited to the company's products.

However, M&S will now adopt the Closed Loop Recycling logo, complete with details on how consumers can sign up to the lunchtime collection scheme, as part of its new ‘Food to Go' range of lunch foods, with 90% of the packaging for the range being made from recyclable material.