Christmas-staple Quality Street has scrapped plastic wrappers in favour of recyclable paper in a new drive to reduce its environmental impact. The infamous chocolate brand claims the change will mean 2 billion wrappers every year can now be recycled instead of going directly to landfill. 

The switch will affect nine of the eleven chocolates in the box, with the Orange Crunch and Green Triangle set to retain their famous foil wrappers. 

This Christmas, customers can expect a mixture of paper and plastic wrappers as Quality Street phases in its new wrappers with a specially designed vegetable-based coating, intended to keep the chocolates fresh but still allow the regular recycling process to take place.

This follows an ongoing trend where several food and drink companies have removed single-use plastics from their packaging and taken other measures to reduce their carbon footprint. In 2018, McDonald’s switched to paper straws in response to a public campaign, following in the footsteps of many restaurants including Wetherspoons, Costa Coffee, and Pizza Express. The fast food giant had previously used over 650 million plastic straws each year – almost all of which ended up in landfill.

In recent years, Pret A Manger has offered a discount to customers who bring a reusable coffee cup, while Evian has begun to sell label-free, recyclable plastic bottles that are made from 100% recycled plastic. Nestlé, the multinational food and drink conglomerate which owns brands including Cheerios, Nespresso, and Maggi, has committed to ensuring all packaging across its brands is either recyclable or reusable by 2025, amid another of its brands, Smarties, reverting to completely recyclable paper packaging.

Coca-Cola announced in 2018 that it planned to collect and recycle all of its packaging by 2030, and in the same year, Iceland committed to halt the use of plastic from its own-brand packaging by 2023.

Other Supermarkets have also announced plans to review the use of single-use plastics in packaging, with ASDA, Waitrose and Aldi all seeing reductions in recent years. In addition, there are now 5,000 collection points in supermarkets across the UK for all kinds of plastic wrappers. This has occurred alongside government legislation that means stores including supermarkets must charge for single-use carrier bags.

Helen Bird, the Head of Business Collaboration at Wrap (a government-funded recycling group), praised the announcement made by Quality Street, saying reducing plastic packaging is ‘something we need to significantly ramp up in the UK, and across the world.’

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