MORRISONS is the first retailer to completely remove black plastic from all its own brand food and drink packaging.

The supermarket giant will no longer use black plastic for its own brand products meaning around 4,000 tonnes of plastic being made more easily recyclable.

One of the main areas benefitting most is the supermarket's ready meal range which has changed from black plastic packaging to a recyclable plastic which contains 85% recycled content.

Coloured by using carbon black pigments, black plastic packaging is invisible to optical sorting equipment at plastic recovery and sorting facilities which means a lot of the packaging ends up in a landfill or is incinerated.

Natasha Cook, packaging manager at Morrisons said: “It’s important to our customers that we make it easier to recycle plastic and so we are very pleased to announce that we’ve been able to eliminate black plastic from our own-brand products.”

Morrisons have already removed 174m plastic produce bags from fruit and veg aisles, 600 tonnes of unrecyclable polystyrene from branded food and drink products and 1,300 tonnes of plastic as a result of the launch of our paper carrier bags.