News in brief | Canada Plastics Pact launches to tackle plastics pollution

Canada’s relationship to plastic waste fundamentally changed: the Canada Plastics Pact (CPP) launched to end plastic waste and pollution.

The Pact brings together key players to collectively work towards ambitious 2025 goals that they could never achieve on their own.

More than 40 Partners have joined the Canada Plastics Pact, representing diverse parts of the plastics value chain, from leading brands to waste management companies, government institutions, and NGOs.

Because plastic packaging accounts for 47% of all plastic waste, it is the immediate focus of the CPP’s collective efforts.

An ambitious pre-competitive, multi-stakeholder platform, the CPP will enable companies across the Canadian plastics value chain to collaborate and innovate. It will build on significant work that has already been underway to reduce plastics waste, and will grow over time.

Together, Partners will rethink the way they design, use, and reuse plastics, thereby charting a path toward a circular economy for plastic by 2025.

With an eye for bold systemic change, the CPP will work to eliminate the plastics ‘we don’t need’, innovate to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and circulate the plastic we use, keeping it in the economy and out of the environment.

The CPP is working towards four clear, actionable targets by 2025:

  • Define a list of plastic packaging that is to be designated as problematic or unnecessary and take measures to eliminate them
  • Support efforts towards 100% of plastic packaging being designed to be reusable, recyclable or compostable
  • Undertake ambitious actions to ensure that at least 50% of plastic packaging is effectively recycled or composted
  • Ensure an average of at least 30% recycled content across all plastic packaging (by weight)

 

Costa Coffee and ‘Too Good To Go’ expand food waste partnership

Costa Coffee has expanded its partnership with the number one anti-food-waste app, Too Good To Go, with the offering now available at 1,100+ participating UK stores.

By partnering with Too Good To Go, Costa Coffee fans will help to prevent unsold food from going to waste.

Shoppers simply need to download the free Too Good To Go app and make their purchase, before collecting at a designated pick-up time from their chosen nearby participating store. The collection – or Magic Bag as they’re known – can consist of three or more items worth at least £10 (if purchased at full price), all reduced to the lower price of £3.

In 2018, Costa Coffee became the first large-scale UK coffee chain to partner with Too Good To Go and since then has seen an impressive 100,000 Magic Bags collected across stores. What’s more, this staggering result builds on the success that the Too Good To Go team has seen since launching the app in 2016, with their ‘Waste Warriors’ saving over 60 million meals from going to waste worldwide

By making sure these items are not going to waste, Costa Coffee and Too Good To Go’s Waste Warriors have saved 250 tonnes of CO2 emissions, Costa says.

 

Veolia and Carbon Clean announce first UK carbon capture trials

Veolia is set to become the first UK operator of Energy Recovery Facilities (ERF) to demonstrate the latest carbon capture technology with Carbon Clean, a carbon capture technology.

The companies have been working in partnership for four years, and the new joint project will highlight how the latest patented technology can work effectively on Energy from Waste (EfW) plants.

Teams from the partnership have already started work on the project with the trial estimated to start during Spring 2021.

Veolia currently operates ten plants that take around 2.3 million tonnes of non-recyclable waste and transform this into electricity for over 400,000 homes.

This combined generating capacity of 180MWe takes pressure off the stretched UK electrical grid and effectively avoids using fossil fuels for generation.

Some of these facilities also produce heating for communities through district heating networks, by using combined heat and power technology.

As an estimated 20% of the nation’s carbon emissions are generated by domestic heating, due to a low standard of energy efficiency, using this type of non – fossil fuel heating lowers carbon emissions and can help reduce cost, and fuel poverty, in vulnerable groups.

Biffa to support Winchester City Council with new sustainable approach to waste

Waste management company, Biffa, has begun an eight-year contract with Winchester City Council, which will see a ‘new waste strategy’ for the area including lower emission vehicles and free electrical items waste collections, it says.

The services from Biffa will cover household waste and recycling, plus new and improved approaches and technology which will support Winchester City Council to work towards its sustainability goals, including the target to become carbon neutral by 2024.

These include new refuse vehicles for the area, which are designed to emit lower levels of pollutants and replace older, higher-emission producing models, resulting in cleaner air for the district in Hampshire. The new vehicles are also narrower, therefore will reduce congestion on the roads.

The vehicles are also fitted with new onboard technology, which will provide real-time data to Winchester City Council and Biffa about any missed collections or issues, enabling them to work together to resolve these quickly, ensuring the most efficient service possible.

Furthermore, the new contract with Biffa will introduce the free collection of waste electrical items such as kettles, clocks and toasters.

In line with Biffa’s sustainable approach, these will be taken to its specialist electric waste recycling depots to be dealt with correctly and recycled wherever possible.

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