Locally-owned supermarket Spinneys has announced it is trialling the company’s first bottle ‘return and reuse’ waste scheme, as part of its ‘No Time for Waste’ sustainability programme.
In partnership with hawa®, a UAE-born sustainable atmospheric drinking water producer, Spinneys aims to inspire its customers to take action and lead a more circular way of living.
The trial, which kicked off on 26th September, will run until the end of December 2022 and encourages shoppers to return their empty glass hawa® bottles to customer service teams at five participating Spinneys stores in Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah.
From there the bottles will be returned to hawa®’s manufacturing facilities, inspected, and industrially cleaned ready to be refilled and stocked on the supermarket’s shelves again.
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Any bottles not selected for reuse will be sent to a glass manufacturer to be recycled as waste feed to save energy in the production process.
The initiative forms part of Spinneys’ ‘Let’s Close the Loop’ campaign, which raises awareness of systems in the UAE that provide an easy solution for customers to get rid of their waste responsibly, and in turn, enables materials to be reused or repurposed.
Spinneys’ customers that partake in this trial will also enjoy an AED 1 discount voucher for each bottle they return, off their next hawa® purchases.
Sophie Corcut, Sustainability Lead at Spinneys commented: “We are delighted to partner with hawa® on this project – a great example of how we can test and learn to build towards a Circular Economy for packaging materials in the UAE.
At Spinneys we are always looking to reduce the waste we produce and make it as easy for customers as we possibly can to build towards a more sustainable shopping journey.
hawa® was fast-tracked onto Spinneys’ shelves through the supermarket’s Local Business Incubator initiative in 2021.
It is the first UAE company to produce drinking water harvested from the sky using advanced technology to turn humidity in the air into filtered and craftily mineralised bottled drinking water.
Gregory Sauvage, co-founder at hawa® added: “Our mission is to ‘make the world greener’ by creating pure, fresh, sustainable drinking water that is good for not only our customers but the planet too. Although glass is more costly and energy-consuming than plastic to produce, it is designed to be reused.
"This reuse system saves raw materials, energy, and CO2 emissions because it reduces the fossil fuels used to produce new bottles.
Bringing a new water source harvested and bottled locally from an infinite humidity reservoir around us is a great step for the UAE sustainability journey and for our future generations water security."
In a bid to make a successful transition to a circular economy, the UAE’s integrated waste management strategic targets including ensuring that 75% of municipal solid waste has the least practicable impact on the environment by 2025 and 85 percent by 2035.
The UAE also aims to reduce municipal solid waste generation to 1.4 kg per person per day by 2025 and 1.2 kg per person per day by 2035 – down from an average of 2.3kg per person in 2022
This year in support of the UAE Government’s plastic waste initiatives, Spinneys embraced the country’s single-use policies at checkout in all of its stores.
The retailer also aims to reduce its own-label packaging by 30% and increase the number of renewable materials used in its packaging by 40% by 2025.
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