Sainsbury’s goes TRAYLESS on whole chickens in change that will save 10M pieces of plastic a year

If you’re planning on cooking a roast chicken over Easter weekend, you might be in for a surprise while grocery shopping.

Sainsbury’s has announced that the ‘by Sainsbury’s’ range of chicken is now trayless.

The retailer is removing the single-use plastic containers from the packaging, in a change that it says will save more than 10 million pieces of plastic per year.

To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 140 tons — 20 times the weight of an elephant — of plastic per year.

‘The trayless products are available in all stores in the UK and online, reducing the amount of single-use plastic that customers have to dispose of at home,’ explains the retail giant.

The shocking magnitude of the plastic crisis: 4.9 MILLION tons of waste floating in our oceans, experts warn – READ MORE

A new study has shed new light on the shocking magnitude of the global plastic crisis

Five products are affected by the change – the XS, S, M, L and XL whole chickens in the ‘by Sainsbury’s’ range.

The plastic bin has been replaced with foil packaging, which can be recycled at one of Sainsbury’s recycling points located at the front of the store.

In 2019, Sainsbury’s pledged to halve its plastic packaging by 2025 by introducing refillable boxes and bottles for everything from milk to cereals, pasta and laundry detergent.

CEO Mike Coupe said at the time: ‘Reducing plastic and packaging is not easy.

‘Packaging plays a vital role in keeping our food safe and fresh and minimizing food waste.

“We therefore need to find alternatives to plastic that protect the quality of our food while minimizing our impact on the environment.”

Since then, Sainsbury’s has taken several measures to reduce the use of plastic.

This includes removing the plastic lids from the dip pots, replacing the plastic used in the two-gallon own-brand ice cream tubs, and removing the plastic wrap from the broccoli.

The news comes shortly after a new study shed new light on the shocking magnitude of the global plastics crisis.

Researchers have found that there are as many as 4.9 million tons of plastic waste floating in our oceans – an “unprecedented increase” since 2005.

And without immediate action, they predict that the rate at which plastics enter our waters will increase as much as 2.6 times by 2040.

“This is a clear warning that we need to act now on a global scale,” said Marcus Eriksen, co-founder and researcher of The 5 Gyres Institute.

“We need a strong, legally binding UN global treaty against plastic pollution that tackles the problem at source.”

The plastic tray (stock image) has been replaced with foil packs, which can be recycled at one of Sainsbury’s recycling points located at the front of the store

Every year, eight million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean

Of the 30 billion plastic bottles used by UK households each year, only 57 per cent are currently recycled.

Since half of this goes to landfill, half of all plastic bottles that are recycled are thrown away.

About 700,000 plastic bottles per day end up as litter.

This is largely due to plastic packaging around bottles being non-recyclable.

Bottles are an important contributor to the increasing amount of plastic waste in the world’s oceans.

Researchers warned that eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year – the equivalent of one truckload per minute.

The amount of plastic waste in the world’s oceans will exceed the amount of fish by 2050 unless the world takes drastic action to continue recycling, a report released in 2016 revealed.

At the current rate, this will increase to four truckloads per minute by 2050, surpassing indigenous life to become the largest mass inhabiting the oceans.

An overwhelming 95 per cent of plastic packaging – worth £65-£92 billion – is lost to the economy after a single use, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report.

And available research estimates that there are more than 150 million tons of plastic in the ocean today.

Plastic pollution is devastating the world’s ecosystems, both marine and terrestrial. It litters riverbanks, traps animals and suffocates entire populations of animals

So much plastic is dumped into the sea each year that it would fill five carrier bags for every foot of shoreline on the planet, scientists warn.

More than half of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

The only industrialized Western country on the list of the top 20 plastic polluters is the United States at number 20.

The U.S. and Europe don’t mismanage their collected waste, so the plastic waste coming from those countries is due to litter, researchers said.

While China is responsible for 2.4 million tons of plastic ending up in the ocean, nearly 28 percent of the world’s total, the United States contributes just 77,000 tons, which is less than one percent, according to the study published in the journal Science.