Bakers Basco is proud to play our part in the UK’s Circular Economy through the responsible use of recyclable materials. The right kind of plastic, used in the right way, can contribute in a major way to helping save the environment.
The message is simple: Retain, Reduce, Recover, Reuse, Recycle.
Running a sustainable RTP circular system is more than just clever product design and hard-wearing materials. There is a whole ecosystem that goes on behind the scenes to track when equipment is diverted out of the supply chain to ensure that our baskets and dollies are retained within the ecosystem and used over and over again before they reach the end of their useful life.
It’s not just the fact that our baskets and dollies are made of recyclable plastic and can be used for more than eight years that reduces the impact on the environment, our products are very carefully designed and manufactured so they make the most efficient use of space possible in storage and in transit - reducing road miles and our environmental footprint.
The Bakers Basco national asset investigations team locates misappropriated equipment and uses negotiation, education, collection and, where necessary, legal enforcement to reclaim the company’s assets and recover financial losses. To date, the division has undertaken just short of 62,000 investigations and recovered over two million Omega baskets and wheels.
Our Omega baskets are made from sturdy polypropylene, which is meant to be reusable for many years. Within the logistics industry, our baskets are categorised as ‘Reusable Transit Packaging’ – packaging which is designed to protect goods in transit, and which is meant to be reused, again and again, not thrown away after one trip.
Plastic, in itself, isn’t the problem – it is how society has become reliant on single use packaging. On average, when used responsibly, our baskets and dollies should last beyond eight years. Only when they have reached the end of their useful life are they recycled, with each piece of kit recycled potentially 400 times during its life span.
Before we launched Bakers Basco, the UK’s bakeries used a multitude of different and incompatible bread basket designs. They also suffered massively from equipment failure, misuse and theft.
It’s estimated that some bakeries expected to lose as many as 50% of their bread baskets across the course of a year. That represented a huge cost and inconvenience for bakers, retailers and, at the end of the day, the bread buying public.
Some of these missing baskets were just being used for purposes they simple weren’t designed for, while many of them were then ending up fly-tipped or in landfill. Others were being stolen and recycled for the value of the raw plastic.
Bakers Basco have a national investigations team dedicated to the recovery of all equipment that ends up in the hands of non-authorised parties. Since launch in 2006, Bakers Basco has worked tirelessly to reduce the number of bread baskets going missing. We have now cut ‘shrinkage’ significantly, through a sensible, but where necessary robust, approach to policing where our products are, responding to incidences of misuse or theft, and, in the most extreme cases, taking appropriate legal action.
Bakers Basco
OUR HELPLINE 08000 327323
Copyright © 2024 Bakers Basco - All Rights Reserved.