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Iceland extends recycling scheme
Frozen food supermarket chain Iceland has extended its reverse vending machine scheme to Northern Ireland.
The machine, now in situ at the chain’s busy Park Centre store in west Belfast, was first trialled in London last year and is now running in six stores across the UK.
The electronic bottle bank machine rewards people for recycling their soft drink bottles with a 10p store voucher for every bottle it accepts. It rejects any containing liquid or plastic bottles containing products not stocked by the supermarket.
Iceland says that since the project began, it has taken in 310,000 bottles and paid out £30,000 in vouchers.
The company says the trial aims to understand consumer perceptions and appetite for the technology and comes ahead of the launch of the Government’s Deposit Return Scheme, providing insights which will allow Iceland to maximise the positive environmental impact of the initiative.
In January 2018, Iceland pledged to eliminate plastic packaging from all of its own label products by the end of 2023.
When the trial was first announced it received a warm welcome from Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who commented: “We can be in no doubt that plastic is damaging to our marine environment. Plastic pollution contributes to killing dolphins, choking turtles and degrading our most precious habitats.
“I applaud Iceland for leading the way with their trial scheme. It is absolutely vital we act now to curb the millions of plastic bottles a day that go unrecycled. Support from businesses will be a vital part of ensuring we leave our environment in a better state than we found it.”
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