Sainsbury’s has repackaged and relaunched its own-brand range of laundry detergents in a bid to help customers cut plastic waste.
The supermarket has replaced sleeved plastic bottle packaging with cardboard cartons across all its own-brand 750ml detergents.
The range has also been reformulated to be super concentrated, allowing for up to five additional washes per package. All packaging can be disposed of via recycling banks or at kerbside, Sainsbury’s said.
The five-SKU range includes Sainsbury’s tropical super concentrated, bio super concentrated, non-bio super concentrated, colour super concentrated and lavender super concentrated lines.
The switch from plastic to cardboard means the cartons are 35% lighter, helping to remove 13 lorries from the road each year, Sainsbury’s said.
Figures from packaging supplier Elopak estimate that removing plastic will reduce carbon emissions by 50% across the range, based on the average tonnage of packaging during transportation.
Sainsbury’s has been working to halve its own plastic packaging across its own-brand household and food ranges by 2025.
In February, it removed plastic trays from its own-brand range of fresh beef mince. The meat is now vacuum packed. It followed similar pledges announced last year, including to remove single-use plastic lids from all of its own-label ranges of dips, creams and yoghurts from this month.
In September, Sainsbury’s switched all own-label coffee pods from plastic to aluminium, which followed a move to replace plastic bags with paper bands on its five-pack Fairtrade bananas in May 2022.
Sainsbury’s ranked fifth among the UK supermarkets for its efforts to tackle plastic waste, according to the latest table collected by Greenpeace in January 2021. It was the highest among the traditional big four and scored highly for its commitment to transparency and to reducing plastic.
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