Helpful stuff

All our cardboard outer packaging is 100% recyclable - and in fact is 90% recycled card itself.

Our foil pouches can’t be recycled but they can be upcycled! We’ve teamed up with TerraCycle to help provide another use for our pouches, pack’o’snacks and bakey-bakies. Find out more here.

Our Stage 1, Stage 2, baby brekkie, cooking sauces and smoothie fruit pouches can’t be recycled through the usual recycling bins in most UK councils because they contain aluminum foil and plastic (although German local authorities, for example, would allow you to recycle this).

Our Stage 3 pouches (which can be put in the microwave unlike our other pouches) are not recyclable because they are made from lots of different layers of material which are not from the same family of 'polymers'.

We faced something of a dilemma when deciding on the packaging for all of our baby food products.

On the one hand the pouches are perfect for kids and babies - squeezy and tactile, while also being the best way to preserve the food naturally without additives or preservatives. But on the other hand they can’t be easily recycled.

Our supplier did provide us with an independent audit of the Life Cycle impact the packaging has on the environment. It shows that the energy used and the environmental impact made when making, transporting and destroying the packaging is significantly less than PET plastic bottles, tetra packs and glass. The packaging also uses 80% less materials than these alternatives. Technically, under EU law, our packaging is approved as recyclable because when incinerated it produces more energy than it used in production and transportation. But UK councils define and deal with recycling in totally different ways (and often totally different ways to each other) so we didn’t feel we could indicate on pack that the product was recyclable.

You may also be aware that at present local authorities in the UK are not recycling flexible packaging. This is something we are looking at coming up with a solution for - not an easy one – so our thinking caps are on!

We also ensure that our UK supplier offsets our carbon footprint.

So, the short answer is that our pouches are unlikely to be able to be recycled by your local council, but don’t forget you can upcycle them instead! The bigger picture is that they have a reduced environmental impact, over their full life, than the other forms of packaging we considered using.

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