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Supermarkets across the UK want to pass their savings on to their customers, providing better value for household staples and retaining their customer base in a competitive space. While some costs remain out of your control, your waste costs are firmly within your sphere of influence.

Are there ways for your food store to simplify your recycling and waste management and cut costs quickly? Here are three tried-and-true strategies used by food retail to improve your bottom line by reducing waste.

Support Diversion with Bins & Signage

The first step to cutting waste costs for supermarkets, corner shops, and green grocers is to focus on waste diversion. Waste diversion reduces the amount of waste sent to the landfill and instead sends it for reuse or recycling.

You might be surprised to find how simple waste diversion can be with the correct tools, including bins and signage. For example, having bins and signage for flexible plastic and film packaging can help update colleagues and customers on the option to recycle these materials. Sainsbury’s has done exactly this in its stores after a successful trial across Northeast England.

Remember that your access to waste management solutions and supply chains offers your business more opportunity to recycle, so be sure to involve customers in bringing back their own consumer recycling waste, if it’s not locally supported.

Support Suppliers with Waste Reduction Efforts

The supermarket ecosystem demands collaboration between retailers and vendors in order to keep shelves stocked and maintain customer growth. Because of this, supermarkets have significant influence over their suppliers and their suppliers’ choice of packaging materials.

Opting to influence suppliers to reduce waste at the source is one of the best ways to cut waste costs over the long-term by holistically reducing the variety and volume of waste.

When less waste comes into your stores, you have less waste to remove from them or pass onto your customer.

What are some items to discuss with suppliers and vendors? Craig Curtis, the president of the Recycling association, shared some helpful ideas with The Guardian:

• Consider simpler packaging, without plastic windows or sticky labels
• Prioritise packaging made of one recyclable material, without adding lamination or unrecyclable plastics
• Avoid black plastic, which can’t be sorted or re-dyed

Working with providers to achieve zero waste won’t just help with costs; your customers will notice and appreciate your efforts. And surveys even show that half of UK consumers are willing to pay more to avoid plastic.

Manage Bulk Recycling with Balers

Britain’s supermarkets create 800,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year. While doing away with packaging entirely isn’t an option yet, there are still better ways to manage the waste you do have and cut costs in the short term. The food retail industry benefits from working with a recycling baler provider to not only bale their plastic and cardboard recycling but also:

• Maximise space in their warehouse and storage areas for optimised inventory management
• Reduce lifts or trips to waste management and recycling facilities, saving fuel, time, and provider costs
• Find new revenue streams through bulk recycling

LSM is the UK food retail industry’s strategic partner in waste management. With an extensive range of baler types and sizes as well as flexible rental options, our team can help your food business realise all the benefits of streamlined recycling.