Our products & plastics

Recycle your plastic wrapping

Unwrapped your Yorkshire Tea box? Now you can recycle the plastic.

You can now take the plastic wrap from our Yorkshire Tea boxes, along with other flexible plastic like bread bags, frozen food bags and crisp packets to most supermarkets to be recycled.

To find your nearest participating supermarket just check out www.recyclenow.com/repeatthecy... In the next few years more and more households will be able to recycle their plastic bags and wrapping at home, but in the meantime many major supermarkets now have easy collection points to drop off your flexible plastics so you know it'll get recycled. Before you take it to a drop off point, make sure it's clean and then do the scrunch test - if you scrunch it tight and it pings back then it's likely to be a soft plastic.

There's lots more information about how and where you can recycle your plastic packaging here.

You can now take the plastic wrap from our Yorkshire Tea boxes, along with other flexible plastic to most supermarkets to be recycled.

Getting rid of the plastic altogether.

While it’s great to now have a recycling solution for the plastic around our boxes, our aim is to get rid of this plastic entirely. Sounds simple right?

In theory we just press the big button in the factory that turns off the plastic wrap process and send the tea boxes out without it. The problem is, that really thin layer of plastic does a great job of protecting the tea. And it’s vital for us to make sure that the taste and quality of our tea remains intact as it moves from us, to shops, to people’s homes. 

We’re not in control of how shops store their stock, and every tea box that’s damaged and can’t be sold has a food waste and carbon footprint impact. The tea inside the box is also super absorbent, so dampness or strong flavours nearby can all ruin it if it’s not protected. We don’t want our tea to go to waste – not just because it would be a crying shame, but also because over 76% of the carbon footprint of our tea products is tied up in the tea itself. It’s important to us to reduce the carbon footprint of our products as much as we can.

Which means we need to create a new box design entirely from scratch.

So, it’s back to the drawing board. We’ve been doing a boatload of packaging and taste tests to design a brand new box from the ground up. Something that’ll hold up to a few bumps and bangs without plastic, which won’t let tea drinkers – or the planet – down. In the meantime please do save your wrap so that it can be recycled the next time you’re at the shops.

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