What is ZeroTrace?
A platform designed to track packaging, creating a data chain that helps us fight packaging waste. In our case, this means soft plastic waste.
The refill & reuse challenge is a system challenge. We're leading the way in home compostable packaging in grocery products and have developed innovative new ways to recover, track, label and fill home compostable packaging to prevent soft plastic ending up in incinerators, landfill, or our oceans.
Find out more about the challenges solved by ZeroTrace below.
Packaging Recovery
Often referred to as "backhauling" but we call it the Compostaloop, this is one of the hardest things to solve in the circular economy.
Our packaging is designed to be composted at home, but what about people who dont have a home compost bin or heap?
Your council food bin gets screened for bags, so they can't go in there (they would compost, but they will be removed by the facility along with all other bags and sent to be incinerated).
Our solution - send them back to us in the provided freepost envelope and we ensure they are composted by a certified facility.
Tracking packaging
We give every bag a unique QR code. That's every individual bag, not just every product variant.
Bags are scanned into your order, and then either scanned when we receive them back or you can scan them into your compost using your phone.
This lets us both prove the system works with a robust chain of custody for the packaging, and reward you with Loopies (points) for helping to fight soft plastic waste by choosing to shop with us.
This system is a world first, with a level of traceability that hasn't been seen before.
Labelling packaging
Labels are very important for both food and non-food products. Usually they are made of plastic, paper and glue, which is terrible for the environment!
It's surprisingly difficult to solve labels that are genuinely home compostable, including the paper, glue and ink.
We have two versions of labels you might see on our packaging:
One is a white thermal label, there's no ink - instead it uses a special coating that changes colour when heated. The coating, paper and glue combination is TUV OK Compost Home certified.
The other is a MagicLabel of our own invention - we use lasers to ablate the label content from a solid area of vegetable ink - meaning no additional paper or glue is used at all!