GREENPEACE campaigners in North Oxford have been handing single-use packaging back to store managers with a note urging them to avoid 'pointless plastic'. 

Activists visited the Co-op Food and M & S Simply Food stores on Banbury Road, Summertown, calling for action to reduce excessive throwaway packaging.

Single-use plastic packaging has become a major public issue and in Oxford there have been various initiatives to reduce its impact, including using recyclable coffee cups and campaigns to highlights businesses taking positive measures on plastic waste.

According to the environmental organisation, UK supermarkets generate more than 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste every year.

On Saturday, shoppers in Summertown were encouraged to remove unnecessary plastic packaging from items they had purchased and leave it at the store, handing responsibility for its disposal back to the company selling it.

Philip Duckham, an Oxfordshire Greenpeace volunteer, said: “After Blue Planet and the general outrage over plastic pollution, I was amazed to see M&S still selling bananas wrapped in plastic.

"Packaging is a huge part of the plastic problem, and supermarkets are responsible for a lot of that packaging. The public have made it very clear that we are not happy seeing our oceans polluted with this pointless plastic, and we need to see supermarkets taking concrete steps to reduce their contribution. This issue isn’t going to go away until they take action.”

Greenpeace volunteers across the country say they visited more than 60 supermarkets in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Environmental Investigation Agency has joined the organisation in conducting a survey of major UK grocery retailers, their use of single-use plastic packaging and their targets to reduce it. 

Greenpeace is urging retailers to introduce transparency by publishing yearly audits of single-use plastic use; set year on year targets to reduce their single-use plastic footprint; urgently eliminate unnecessary and non-recyclable plastic packaging by 2019.

Elena Polisano, a Greenpeace UK Oceans Campaigner, explained: "Supermarkets selling masses of throwaway plastic packaging should be making great strides to stop their plastic from clogging up our oceans.

"Major grocery retailers have a huge role to play in cutting the overall amount of throwaway plastic being produced, making sure unnecessary and non-recyclable plastics are off the shelves by 2019, and switching to truly sustainable solutions. We’ve set this supermarket challenge to encourage retailers to go further, faster, to curb ocean plastic pollution.”

Andrew Torr, a spokesman for the Co-op, said: “Reducing the environmental impact of our products is, and always has been, at the core of Co-op’s efforts. Our ambition is for 100 per cent of our product packaging to be recyclable. Our members and customers expect us to help them to make more ethical choices, and we are committed to doing just that.”

Mr Torr also highlighted a number of initiatives which he said exemplified the company's environmentally friendly ethos, including how it has 'never produced own-brand products containing plastic microbeads'; it replaced all polystyrene pizza boards in own brand pizzas with cardboard ones, 'which is set to save around 200 tonnes of polyboard going to landfill every year'; and  that 'the Co-op estimates that it can save almost 350 tonnes of plastic annually when it switches all of its own brand water to bottles made of 50% recycled (rPET) material.'

A Marks & Spencer spokesperson said: “We’re doing everything we can to reduce the amount of plastic we use – designing plastic out, replacing it with planet friendly alternatives and making sure that any we do use can be easily recycled.”