Quorn, the meat-free food manufacturer, promises to stop using black plastic packages starting this month with its chilled food range. Black plastic is generally sent to landfill in the UK, rather than being recycled because its pigment means the material cannot be sorted by the machine son standard recycling sorting lines.

The manufacturer also promised to reduce and eliminate black plastic from its supply chain. Starting with this month, most of the chilled range will move to white and opaque recyclable plastic, eliminating 297 tonnes of black plastic over the course of a year.

“As a founding signatory of WRAP’s UK Plastic Pact, we are very excited to announce this positive change towards increased sustainability of our products,” said Quorn’s CEO Kevin Brennan. “Moving so quickly to remove black plastic is a significant challenge, but one that, as a sustainable company, we view as being of the utmost importance.”

Zero Waste Scotland has also announced that it will offer £3 million of funding for a new plastic recycling scheme that promises to rapidly increase the volume of plastics heading to recycling, including black plastics.

Project Beacon will use state-of-the-art separation and recycling systems that allow the recycling of almost all plastics, including laminated, black, film and contaminated plastics. Finding a way to recycle this type of plastic could make a major dent in the mountain of plastic waste that end up in landfill and the natural environment each year.

Funded with £1.7 million from Zero Waste Scotland’s Circular Economy Investment Fund and £1.7 million from the private sector, the site is expected to be up and running later this year. It will be run by a group of private sector recycling firms, such as PI Polymer Recycling, Recycling Technologies Ltd and Impact Recycling Ltd, as well as Binn Group, which is signed on as supply chain partners.

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