Tesco to stop selling baby wipes that contain plastic in first for UK supermarkets

theguardian.com:

Tesco is to become the first of the main UK retailers to stop selling baby wipes containing plastic, which cause environmental damage as they block sewers and waterways after being flushed by consumers.

The supermarket said it was stopping sales of branded baby wipes containing plastic from 14 March, about two years after it ceased using plastic in its own-brand products.

The UK’s largest grocer is also the country’s biggest seller of baby wipes. Its customers purchase 75m packs of baby wipes every year, amounting to 4.8bn individual wipes.

Tesco said it had been working to reformulate some of the other own-label and branded wipes its sells to remove plastic, including cleaning wipes and moist toilet tissue. It said its only kind of wipe that still contained plastic – designed to be used for pets – would also be plastic-free by the end of the year.

Tesco began to remove plastic from its own-brand wet wipes in 2020, when it switched to biodegradable viscose, which it says breaks down far more quickly.

Sarah Bradbury, Tesco’s group quality director, said: “We have worked hard to remove plastic from our wipes as we know how long they take to break down.”

Tesco is not the first retailer to remove wipes from sale on environmental grounds. Health food chain Holland and Barrett said it was the first high-street retailer to ban the sale of all wet-wipe products from its 800 UK and Ireland stores in September 2019, replacing the entire range with reusable alternatives. The Body Shop beauty chain has also phased out all face wipes from its shops.

It is estimated that as many as 11bn wet wipes are used in the UK each year, with the majority containing some form of plastic, many of which are flushed down the toilet, causing growing