Will candy buyers recycle their paper? | So Good News

Dec 01, 2022

One of the biggest candy makers is slowly rolling out a new, paper-based product in Australia and New Zealand that could be a more sustainable alternative to plastic.

Mars has announced that it will be rolling out a paper-based version of its Mars, Snickers and Milky Way bars in Australia in April 2023, according to Packaging Gateway. In June it will release a new wrapper for Mars and Snickers bars in New Zealand, which will receive a new Milky Way wrapper the following year. The wrappers are said to be designed for easy kerbside recycling and are expected to reduce the amount of waste in New Zealand’s landfills alone by 11 tonnes.

This isn’t the first move by Mars to try to offset the amount of non-recyclable waste produced by its candy.

In October of this year, when Halloween in the US came under fire for being the biggest generator of single-use plastic waste, Mars distributed 17,400 candy bags in the US, according to Boston Globe. The bags can be filled with discarded candy wrappers and sent to a recycling facility in Illinois that turns the bags into plastic straws, to be recycled back into dog waste bags.

Mars isn’t the only major CPG company that has recently tried to develop environmentally friendly products.

In the 2019 competition Nestlé launched YES! cold drinks bar in recycled wrapping paper, which a Press release was hailed as the first candy to be wrapped in paper using “high-flow wrap” technology. This site is available in Continental Europe and the United Kingdom, but is not available in the US

Earlier this year Keurig Dr. Pepper he announced that was working easily compost and/or recyclable bottles clock, milk and water that are made from organic fibers instead of plastic.

And in 2016 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) pioneered the process edible CPG package which can be made from the milk protein casein.