Waitrose is rolling out a significant change in its supermarkets across the country. In a bid to improve its sustainability efforts, Waitrose is the first major UK supermarket to roll out invisible tags on much of its fresh dairy range to help track package recycling. The roll-out will kick off this week, but customers won’t notice the change thanks to smart technology. Waitrose has extended its collaboration with Polytag, a partnership that was initially announced back in April. 

On milk bottles in Waitrose stores across the UK, there will be invisible recycling tags to help the supermarket track how well customers are recycling packaging. The invisible labels, which become visible under UV light, will be added to Waitrose’s own-label milk bottles, while there are plans in the pipeline to add these labels to more of the supermarket’s products in the near future. 

Waitrose has invested £100,000 in detection units at two of the largest recycling centres in the UK. This will allow the supermarket to use these invisible labels to capture data and determine how much of its customer base is recycling its own-brand milk packaging. 

This, in turn, will help the supermarket make decisions about recycling information in packaging designs. PolyTag, a company that was founded in the UK in 2018, says that it hopes these invisible tags will become more common across the retail industry. 

Denise Mathieson, head of packaging innovation and programme delivery at Waitrose, said: “We know that many Waitrose customers are committed to recycling, and with Polytag’s invisible tag solution we can start monitoring the recycling of our packaging at scale using real-time data.”

She added: “Improving recycling and protecting resources requires collaboration, and we will be discussing with the UK government how this data can be used to positively incentivise industry action.”

Meanwhile, Alice Rackley, CEO of Polytag, said: “Having barcode-level data is a fundamental starting point to benchmark and improve recycling performance over time – what gets measured gets managed.

“The ambitions that Waitrose has for the Polytag solution are super exciting, and the whole team at Polytag is feeling energised by Waitrose’s vision and commitment to have an intentional positive impact on UK recycling performance.”