Quality Street wants greener sweets as Nestle switches to paper wrappers for the festive favourite in bid to slash plastic waste
- Quality Street twist wrappers are set to be made from paper instead of plastic
- The brand can be traced back to 1936 with success driven by colourful wrappers
- Owner, Nestle, announced switch to greener packaging in the coming months
- Nestle’s KitKats will be wrapped with plastic that is 80 per cent recycled
Sweet lovers will soon be noticing a change to their boxes of Quality Street.
The twist wrappers on the chocolates are to be made from paper instead of plastic as Nestle switches to greener packaging in the coming months.
The confectionery giant will also be wrapping KitKats with plastic that is 80 per cent recycled.
Replacing the cellulose-foil Quality Street wrappers on nine of the 11 sweets will mean billions fewer bits of plastic in its supply chain.
Quality Street’s colourful twist wrappers will soon be made from paper instead of plastic
The other two sweets use just foil and will stay the same.
Nestle said that, unlike cellulose, the new wrappers break down easily and are accepted in household recycling.
The Quality Street brand can be traced back to 1936 and the family of John Macintosh.
Its great success was heavily driven by the beautiful wrappers which included a range of materials, such as wax paper, foil and the plant-based plastic cellulose.
Cellulose became the dominant material in recent decades, but it cannot be easily recycled and may take decades to degrade if dropped as litter.
The Quality Street brand can be traced back to 1936 and the family of John Macintosh
The transition to paper will take several months to complete. This means that consumers will find a mix of both the old and new wrappers in their Christmas Quality Street cartons, pouches, tubs, and tins.
Nestlé said KitKat will introduce wrappers made with 80 per cent recycled plastic.
These wrappers can then be recycled through soft plastic recycling bins at more than 5,000 supermarkets – and placed in household recycling in the Republic of Ireland.
The rollout will begin this month on the brand’s flagship two-finger products, before being extended across the range by 2024.
Purchased by more than six in ten households, KitKat will use the highest proportion of recycled food-grade plastic of any major confectionery brand.
The packs will feature the Recycle At Store On-Pack Recycling Label (OPRL) – a UK labelling scheme established by the British Retail Consortium to help consumers correctly reuse and recycle more material.
Nestlé said KitKat will introduce wrappers made with 80 per cent recycled plastic
Richard Watson, Business Executive Officer, Nestlé Confectionery said: ‘These major packaging innovations have been pioneered by our teams here in the UK.
The new KitKat packaging is enabled by a significant upgrade to Nestlé’s York Factory, while the category-leading Quality Street paper twist-wraps have been designed at our Confectionery Product Technology Centre in York, and implemented in Halifax, the home of Quality Street for 87 years.
‘Nestlé Confectionery is taking a leadership position on packaging sustainability as we work towards reducing our use of virgin plastic by one third and making all our packaging recyclable or reusable within the next three years.’
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