Marks & Spencer is teaming up with a recycling technology group to enable the retailer to trace what happens to its drinks bottles, cartons and other plastic packaging.
The Polytag system prints an invisible tag on to containers, which can be picked up by electronic readers located at recycling centres.
Products featuring the tags will begin appearing on shelves in the next three months.
Different aspects of the system have been tested with The Co-op, Aldi and Ocado, the online grocery specialist which has also invested in Polytag, but this will be the first full-scale use of the scheme.
As part of the project, M&S will also fund the installation of two readers at recycling sites in Northern Ireland and Edmonton, north London, which will add to two existing sites on Teesside and one in north Wales.
The Welsh government is also funding the installation of readers at a further three recycling centres in the country.
In a year’s time, Polytag is aiming to have more than 12 sites that will account for half of all the single-use plastic household waste recycled in the UK, as it expects to sign up additional retailers who will fund the installation of further readers at recycling centres. It is hoping to increase that to 48 UK sites covering 95% of household waste recycling.
The project launches as retailers prepare to pay new fees towards the disposal of plastic packaging next year under the government’s delayed extended producer responsibility (EPR) regime.
Retailers are already bound to monitor and report the amount of packaging they sell and future fees are expected to be based on those measures.
The retail industry has called for the money raised by the EPR scheme to go towards building better recycling infrastructure in the UK so that materials can be reused locally.
Alice Rackley, the chief executive of Polytag, which is based in Deeside, near Chester, said the system would aid the sorting of plastic pots and bottles so that items that once contained food, which are worth more than those contaminated with household chemicals such as bleach, could be separated out more easily.
“There is a massive single-use plastic crisis and we have got to start collecting data about it and to use that to try and sort it out,” Rackley said.
She added that the ability to show items had been properly recycled might also be used by retailers as a way to demand lower EPR fees.
The system will not be able to monitor what happens to products sent overseas or show how many items end up in landfill. However, Rackley said the scheme could be used to check that waste disposal partners were handling plastic in the correct manner.
