Take action – tweet your supermarket
We were shocked to hear that billions of the so-called recyclable black plastic trays used for many ready meals and other food items end up in landfill.
It turns out that, even though these trays could be recycled, the black pigment used to make them look sleek and shiny on the shelves makes them invisible to most of the machines that sort our recycling.
This means that even when we think we're helping the environment by recycling our packing at home, most of the time they'll head straight back to join the rest of our rubbish at the dump.
It doesn't have to be this way. For just 0.05p per tray, manufacturers and retailers could switch to a type of pigment that is easily recognised by sorting machines. And we could end all this needless waste.
It's ridiculous that this hasn't happened already.
Many supermarkets have even tested new recyclable trays – but they're still using the old ones.
Let's let the supermarkets know that we want recyclable to mean recyclable.