What’s happening at Taylors?

Plastic is something which is getting a lot of focus worldwide, and here at Taylors. We’ve put a lot of work into evaluating where we use plastic and why.

Making changes to our products takes time, because with big changes comes rigorous testing to ensure the new materials we want to use are suitable. Sometimes we’re waiting for the perfect packaging material to become available so that we can ensure our products reach you safely at the quality you’d expect and we'll likely need to change the machinery we use in our factory to package up your coffee.

In the meantime, we've teamed up with TerraCycle who offer a recycling solution for flexible plastics like coffee film that can't currently be recycled at home or in-store. For more information and how to sign up, take a look at this.

The Plastics Pact

In 2018 we signed up to the UK Plastics Pact which means we have targets to eliminate unnecessary plastic, increase the use of recycled plastic, and make all plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.

Historically, plastic has played a key role in our coffee packs. This is because we’ve found it to be the most effective and versatile material for keeping our coffee fresh. This is not only important to give our customers a high-quality brew but also to allow for a longer supermarket shelf-life, so that as little coffee as possible ends up unsold as food waste.

We’ve been working with suppliers to find viable alternatives to our current packaging which will still do the same job but which can be recycled.

While we are busy working on how to make this packaging recyclable, the current waste infrastructure also has some way to go to support these changes. Right now there are very few flexible plastics that are collected from our home recycling bins and only 6% of flexible plastic is currently recycled.

We’re proud to be part of the Flexible Packaging Consortium, run by Suez, which is working with Defra to include flexible plastics in UK household recycling collections from 2023.

We’ll keep you updated with news of how we’re doing. In the meantime, if you want to know more about recycling our packaging, you can take a look at our how to recycle section for tips and pointers.