Northampton Greenpeace volunteers 'hand back' customers’ unwanted plastic packaging to Tesco

On Saturday (February 23), the volunteers in Abington Street asked shoppers to fill their baskets with single-use packaging so they could 'return' it to the manager at a nearby Tescos.

Greenpeace claims UK supermarkets generate more than 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste every year and call it a major contributing factor to plastic pollution.

Tesco supermarket customers wrote personal messages to Tesco telling them to 'ditch single-use plastic'. One customer called on Tesco supermarket to 'please stop using unnecessary plastic - save the oceans' while another said 'please help save our turtles'.

Shirley Waterhouse, a volunteer with Northants local Greenpeace group, said: “When you go around the supermarkets you can see unnecessary packaging, especially on fruit and vegetables like cauliflowers and bananas.

"The more we can do to show that it's not needed, not wanted and not necessary the more we can reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans and rivers. It feels good that there has been so much support in Northamptonshire."

A survey of supermarket plastic use by Greenpeace UK and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) revealed that despite their huge plastic footprint, half of the supermarkets surveyed have no specific targets to reduce plastic packaging and most would take more than 20 years to completely rid their shelves of throwaway plastic.

Tesco is ranked 5th in the league table published as part of the survey. It has no specific targets to reduce plastic packaging.

Shirley Waterhouse said: "That’s why 800,000 people have signed Greenpeace’s petition calling on supermarkets to ditch single-use plastics, including 121 Northamptonshire locals plus an additional 30 signed the petition today on Abington Street.”