Return of brewer's plastic tub recycling scheme

Greene King, the UK's largest pub company and brewer, again calling on customers to take their empty plastic confectionery tubs to its pubs in an effort to reduce waste and raise money for Macmillan.

Tens of millions of tubs containing chocolates, sweets and biscuits are sold in the UK each year, with the majority sold during the Christmas period. These are typically made from polypropylene which is not always accepted by local authorities for recycling, resulting in them being incinerated or landfilled.

Customers are being encouraged to drop off their used tubs at any of Greene King’s managed pubs, restaurants and hotels across the UK. In Broughty Ferry, this includes the Post Office Bar, The Fisherman’s Tavern and The Bell Tree.

The tubs will be taken to a specialist recycling facility and processed into granulated recycled plastic. The recycled plastics are then sold with the profits, approximately eight pence per tub, going to Macmillan Cancer Support. If every tub sold in the UK over Christmas was recycled this, it would raise almost £400,000 in donations.

Greene King is partnering with co-cre8, specialists in dealing with hard-to-recycle materials and responsible for attracting large businesses to support the campaign and DCW Polymers, which will use its reprocessing plant to shred and granulate the tubs for sale to manufacturers, instead of virgin plastic.

Vance Fairman-Smith, supply chain director, said: "We're really pleased to be able to provide this recycling service to our local communities. This is a ‘win win' situation as we look to save the plastic tubs going to landfill and at the same time being able to support our national charity partner, Macmillan."

Peter Goodwin, co-cre8's co-founder, added: "This year we really expect the campaign to take off with as many as 1700 Greene King pubs getting behind it. Last year's campaign was greatly impacted due to Covid restrictions, and yet despite the fact that all pubs were closed, more than five thousand tubs were collected.”

Greene King will be accepting tubs during the whole of January 2022.