An anti-plastic group has criticized Sainsbury’s move to swap its ground beef from hard plastic trays for vac packs.
The supermarket said the change will use 55% less plastic after some customers said it turned the ground beef into mush and was difficult to cook.
Campaign group A Plastic Planet said the vacuum packs are not included in most household recycling collections.
Sainsbury’s said they could be recycled in stores and customers would have to get used to the new look and cook differently.
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The supermarket announced it would be “the first retailer to vacuum pack all ground beef, saving 450 tons of plastic every year.” It is part of the goal to halve the use of plastic packaging for private label products by 2025.
But Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet, said: “Although the weight of the plastic used is saved, switching to flexible plastic over rigid plastics is no more environmentally friendly than switching from a petrol to a diesel vehicle.”
She said soft or flexible plastics are “nearly impossible to recycle, especially when contaminated with food.”
“The old rigid plastic packaging would at least have been recycled, however limited the UK systems are,” she added. “Instead, the new vacuum packaging ends up in the residual waste and ends up in incineration.”
Richard Crampton, head of fresh food at Sainsbury’s, told the BBC that the UK lags behind Europe and the rest of the world in terms of the use and recyclability of flexible plastics. “So it’s true that you can’t pick it up curbside just yet,” he said.
He said they had “exactly the same problem” with the film covering the hard plastic trays that used to pack the ground beef. “It’s the same problem, but now there’s a lot less plastic,” he said.
“Customers cannot influence the packaging we make,” he said. “I think it’s our responsibility to do this for them and we take it very seriously. It is both a moral and a corporate responsibility – it is the right thing to do.”
Environmental campaign group Wrap said plastic bags and packaging could be recycled at more than 6,000 locations across the UK. It has a recycling locator to find the next one.
Some shoppers had posted their dislike of the vacuum-packed ground beef on social media and reviews on Sainsbury’s website.
One said the flesh now resembled “a rectangle of crushed scraps” and another “somebody’s kidney”.
Mr Crampton said: “It’s exactly the same ground beef… but more compressed… so we need customers to prepare it a little differently.
“It’s as simple as it just takes more movement with a wooden spoon to break up the product,” he said. There are cooking instructions on the new vac packs.
Mr Crampton said Sainsbury’s had tested the move with chefs and customers and had “not received any negative feedback at all” so he was confident of rolling it out across all stores.
He said the number of complaints they received were “fractions of less than one percent” and that sales and market share had not changed.
Asked if Sainsbury’s would consider going back to the old packaging, He said: “We always listen to customers, but at the moment there isn’t any overwhelming data telling us we shouldn’t.”
He said vacuum-packed meat was common in the EU and US, and recipe boxes in the UK, and he wouldn’t be surprised if other supermarkets followed suit.
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