Good PR

Down with plastic waste

Let’s talk coffee cups and coffee pods. Until now, they’re known to be incredibly damaging to the environment. Disposable cups usually can’t be recycled as they typically have a plastic coating, and therefore they tend to go onto landfill. Similar for the coffee pods that you might put in that fancy coffee machine you have at home.

Well, not anymore.

Firstly, we can now get our hands on eco-friendly coffee thanks to the Eden Project’s latest range of biodegradable coffee pods. Instead of throwing the coffee pod into the bin once you’ve made your drink, you can now recycle them or even go on to compost them.

Secondly, Waitrose has announced that as of 30 April it is going to be ditching disposable cups from nine of its stores, before going nationwide in the autumn. Waitrose estimates that the move will prevent 52 million cups being given and thrown away a year.

Have no fear, myWaitrose loyalty scheme customers can still get a free tea or coffee from the self-service machines, they’ll just simply have to take their own reusable cup.  

Bad PR

Sainsbury’s mix-up

I can’t imagine there’s anything worse for a vegan, who’s participating in a vegan demonstration, to nip into Sainsbury’s to get a vegan lunch only to bite into it and realise it’s full of duck. Even worse for Isobel, the vegan in question, is that she ate half of her wrap whilst taking part in the ‘Anonymous for the Voiceless’ demonstration, put the rest in her bag and only noticed the duck when she took the wrap out of her bag to finish it off. htt

Isobel understands that it was clearly a mix-up at the factory, but is now calling for all vegetarians and vegans to be able to check the contents of the food they want to buy before they make a purchase. I’m not sure how that would work – it sounds like there’s going to be a lot of grubby fingers in people’s foods.

Regardless, this is bad PR for Sainsbury’s. How many vegetarians and vegans are going to accidentally eat hoisin duck if there was in fact a mix-up at the factory?

Written by Samantha Summers, 10 Yetis
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