The company, which has nine million customers a week, says plastic bag recycling bins have been positioned within the stores in a convenient area close to the entrance and checkouts.
The plastic carrier bags deposited will be baled with clean, clear back of store film and sent for recycling along with polythene accumulated from other sources at stores.
Bales will be delivered to a handful of distribution centres around the country and then collected by a company called J & A Young, based in Leicestershire for recycling.
Recycling
J & A Young currently collects and recycles post-consumer waste from several major retailers, this material is re-used in a range of products including refuse sacks and builders film.
The bags are taken to its 80,000 square foot production facility in Loughborough, which has a baling and sorting operation using a Boa baling press and three Erema recycling lines.
Material is sorted and graded to specific sizes and a grinding operation can create manageable sized pieces to be processed on the recycling lines.
Trials
Alistair Hall, Morrison' purchasing manager for packaging, waste management and recycling said that in trials at 12 stores over 12 months, an average of 60,000 bags or 60 kilos were collected each week per store.
He said: “The aim is for customers to re-use our bags first. We have a reuse message on them and the bags are stronger than some of our competitors. A lot do re-use their bags already but the majority don't.”
The company has placed its plastic bag recycling bins next to temporary collection containers for Christmas card recycling, which will run at stores until the end of January.
As well as providing customer recycling facilities, Morrisons says it has strict procedures in place to allow for the recycling of packaging used to transport goods into the store warehouse, such as cardboard and plastics. The company also recently introduced some compostable packaging.
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