As part of a new sustainability initiative, Morrisons has announced that it is introducing new ‘rentable’ boxes on its Salad Bar in key trial stores. It has also announced the removal of plastic cutlery from all its stores. The scheme known as ‘Refill a Box’ is the first of its kind to be trialled by a UK supermarket. The boxes will replace the supermarket’s current large salad boxes and are designed to be used 400 times.

Customers will be required to regiter through the ‘CauliBox’ app and will need to scan the QR code on the Salad Bar point-of-sale, before collecting an empty box, filling it and pay at the checkout as normal. Boxes can then be returned to the designated drop-off point at the Salad Bar when customers next visit and the QR code scanned again.

Lorraine Wheeler, Environmental Packaging Manager at Morrisons, said “Thousands of customers visit our Salad Bars every week – and this is increasing as people go back out to work. Until now we’ve stocked recyclable single-use plastic containers, but we think customers will be ready to swap to this reusable box – as it’s so simple to use. We hope to roll it out to more stores this year.”

Morrisons has committed to a 50 per cent reduction across its own brand primary plastic packaging by 2025. Since 2017, Morrisons has reduced its own brand plastic packaging by over 8,000 tonnes a year and replaced another 7,000 tonnes so that it is fully recyclable.

The move to refillable boxes is the latest initiative from Morrisons to remove plastic packaging from its stores. Other recent commitments have included introducing a refillable container scheme for its customers at its butcher and fishmonger counters in 2018 and introducing paper carrier bags at checkouts in 2019. Morrisons is also currently the only UK supermarket to own its own recycling plant in Fife which will reprocess hard-to-recycle soft plastic.

Image: Morrisons