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Environmental campaigners respond to Iceland’s honest plastics announcement: “We need a model shift to reusables to tackle supermarkets plastic crisis”

Responding to Iceland’s announcement that they used in 2019 alone more than 1.8 billion items using primary plastic, and over 100 million items of secondary and tertiary plastic, the not-for-profit environmental organisation City to Sea that campaigns to stop plastic pollution today responded saying there was a need for a ‘model shift to reusables’.

 

The CEO of City to Sea, Rebecca Burgess commented saying,

“Iceland should be congratulated for their honesty and we support the call for all big retailers to follow suit. This is a huge wake-up call that policy-makers can’t ignore. If the grocery industry uses plastic at the same rate as Iceland have been, then the industry would have been responsible for 72 billion pieces of primary plastic*. This is both deeply alarming and a clear signal that we need to rethink supermarkets dependency on plastic. There have been endless promises of magic bullets for materials to swap out single-use plastic, but often this is purely a delay tactic. Supermarkets must remove of all pointless packaging and adopt at scale reuse systems.”

 

*Iceland have 2.5% of the industry and used 1.8 billion pieces of primary plastic  

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