Supermarket to trial clear caps on milk bottles in a bid to improve recyclability
Aldi is to trial the use of clear caps on its milk bottles in a bid to improve the recyclability of its products.
The UK’s fifth-largest supermarket – set to soon overtake Morrisons in fourth place – will scrap the familiar green bottle tops on its semi-skimmed milk range in favour of clear caps, as they are easier to recycle.
The trial will take place in Aldi stores in Cheshire, Manchester and Liverpool, in partnership with milk supplier Müller.
A successful trial is expected to lead to a rollout across all of Aldi’s Müller-supplied stores, which would save an additional 60 tonnes of recycled High-Density Polythene (rHDPE) every year.
This could then be reconverted into food-grade packaging, as the milk bottle tops could be reused to create new milk bottles.
Aldi’s Plastics and Packaging Director Richard Gorman said: “We know it’s becoming increasingly important to our customers that their everyday products are environmentally-friendly, and we are constantly reviewing ways to become a more sustainable supermarket.
“By trialling clear milk caps we are making our milk bottles easier to recycle, so they can be turned back into new packaging.”
HDPE has been the go-to milk bottle material for many years, replacing its predecessor glass due to superior strength and lighter weight, which radically reduces energy costs of transportation, whilst reducing breakage.
Plastic milk bottles can also be moulded into more ergonomic and complex bottle shapes to make them easier to use and more efficient to stack, allowing more milk to be transported or stored in the same crate.
HDPE is also highly recyclable, making it a perfect material for use in milk bottles – able to withstand the stresses of transportation, usage, cleaning, chopping, cutting, melting and reforming into new milk bottles.
The only real downside of HDPE use in milk bottles is that the dye molecules used to colour the distinctive bottle tops binds so well with the HDPE that it is very difficult to separate during recycling, meaning bottle tops – whether full-fat blue, semi-skimmed green or skimmed red – need removing and recycling separately to the bottles themselves.
Aldi’s trial of replacing the green lid in its semi-skimmed range with a clear bottle top that can be recycled along with the rest of the bottle is the latest effort towards its target of making 50% of its plastic packaging from recycled materials by 2025.
Image courtesy of Aldi.
