Another important award within our Nature Fresh project has been reached thanks to the fervent activity of our UK office and Michele Govoni even during the first lockdown period this year.
Our UK client Westaway Sausages has just been awarded with the 2020 UK Packaging Awards, with its 100% compostable packaging for sausages being recognised as “Innovation of the Year“!
This packaging includes Nature Fresh film wrapping.
Furthermore, the Company has been shortlisted as one of five finalists – including four goliaths of pork, beef and poultry processing in the UK – for the Meat, Poultry and Seafood Manufacturing Company of the Year in the Food Manufacturer Excellence Awards. This major award will be announced next February, so… fingers crossed!!
And here’s the whole story: Westaways is a family owned Devon company that produces up to 250,000 fresh, frozen, and fully cooked sausages a day from fresh British pork. They supply retailers, wholesalers, and business users throughout the UK and have an ever-growing export business.
Its Owner and Managing Director, Charles Baughan, is deeply committed in reducing plastic waste: “Plastic is an incredible material, but it has a legacy that we can no longer ignore. We must all make changes; our changes will help others to change. Walk down a meat or dairy aisle in any supermarket, and you will see that just about every product is wrapped in plastic. Plastic film, including cling film, makes up roughly a third of all the plastic packaging used in the UK each year and the majority ends up in landfill. Our wrapping (i.e. Nature Fresh) is different. It is a compostable bioplastic that will fully disintegrate without leaving any microplastic traces.”
To create their certified compostable packaging, Westaways spent three years trialling materials to replace the plastic tray. This led to them using a card tray and sleeve made from sustainably sourced wood pulp. The film overwrap came by Westaways working closely with Fabbri Group: Nature Fresh, the world’s first bioplastic compostable cling film made for automatic packaging worldwide. All the packaging, including the cling film, can be put in your food waste bin or can be home composted where it will convert into CO2, water, and biomass, ready to spread on your vegetable patch.
That’s how today a small company from the heart of Devon is celebrating after winning Innovation of the Year at the 2020 UK Packaging Awards for its unique eco-friendly packaging.
Charles Baughan commented: “We knew we were doing the right thing in challenging the need for producers to use plastic trays wrapped in films that cannot easily be recycled. There are over 400 million packs of meat products sold in the UK every year packed this way. I hope this ground-breaking innovation by our small team will challenge the whole sector. Here in South West England we live in a wonderful part of the world, and we know that packaging does not always end up where it should, we feel strongly that doing nothing is not an option. We hope this will become an industry standard.”
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