Kelly’s replaces black packaging in ice cream tubs

Effective immediately, all product lines in Kelly’s take-home range of frozen desserts will be packaged in silver plastic. Clotted Cream was the last flavour in the range that was still packaged in black plastic.

The decision formed part of the producer’s parent company Froneri’s wider environmental strategy.

Environmental strategy​

Froneri UK head of marketing Charlotte Hambling said: “Our Clotted Cream flavour will now be found in the same silver plastic tubs as the other flavours in our take home range, while the product itself remains the same truly Cornish Clotted Cream ice cream our customers know and love.​

“More widely, in the UK, Froneri is also looking at all alternative solutions to move away from the use of Polystyrene, to more preferred recyclable options. And we have no plans to use black plastic in any further product development.”​

Froneri is the latest food and drink firm to remove black plastic packaging from its products in the UK. In June, vegetarian food producer Quorn has announced plans to remove black plastic from its packaging range.

Not recycled​

The work to replace black plastic by food and drink manufacturers followed a report from the Waste and Resources Action Programme in April 2017, which found the material was not being recycled by local authorities and was instead being sent to landfills.

Optical sorting systems that are widely used in plastics recycling do not detect the plastic, as the carbon black pigments used to colour it do not allow the packaging to reflect light.

This in turn leads to the packaging ending up as residue and is disposed of in landfill or recycled into lower value materials where polymer sorting is not required.