UK supermarket Sainsbury’s is teaming up with Ecover to start offering in-store refills of laundry detergent and washing up liquid as a part of its ongoing fight against the levels of single-use plastic being used by the shop. Ecover, the Belgian eco-friendly cleaning brand whose extensive range of products are stocked in Sainsbury’s stores across the country, will act as a partner for the supermarket to help it curb its usage of plastics on general products by offering refill stations where retail customers can refill their initially purchased bottle or bring containers of their own, thus reducing the need to buy a brand new bottle.
The system will be trialled at a Sainsbury’s in North London, where customers will have the opportunity to refill their cleaning products fifty times before having to purchase a brand new item from the shelves. The retailer has suggested that this could reduce the amount of plastic being used by the company by more than a million tonnes and encourage customers to recycle and reuse the packaging that cleaning products often come in. If the scheme is successful, it could be rolled out to 20 more stores this year, with the company looking to roll it out nationwide should it become a customer favourite.
This announcement comes as part of Sainsbury’s major environmental plan – which includes reducing plastic use, reducing water waste and increasing biodiversity- ultimately planning to invest £1bn into becoming carbon neutral by 2040. It’s hoped that, in its collaboration with Ecover, they can make eco-friendly products available to all of their customers in a way that decreases their overall impact on the environment. It’s hoped that this will not only encourage other supermarkets to install their own re-fill stations but diversify the kinds of items available for people to refill rather than purchase packaging brand new.
Supermarkets are among some of the worst offenders for using non-recyclable or single-use plastic and many UK retailers are now beginning to implement and investigate how they can reduce plastic use within their stores. Sainsbury’s was named the most eco-friendly supermarket in 2018 and has publicly committed itself to reducing its net carbon emissions to zero and continuously improving on the eco-friendliness of their stores through both its centralised operations and through its global suppliers. In 2019, Waitrose announced that, following a successful trial period, it would be rolling out its in-store re-fill stations for over 100 different products, ranging from pasta and cereals to wine and frozen fruits.