Reducing plastic waste

Plastic pollution is causing huge damage to our natural environment. While plastic waste isn’t Virgin Media’s biggest environmental impact, we too want to do our bit.

Today, on World Environment Day, we’re mobilising our people to get behind our established plan to reduce plastic across our business. Our plan tackles the most common uses of plastic, not just single-use, in our operations and products.

The plan has three areas of focus;

• Working with suppliers – using our buying power to cut down plastic use and find new solutions, especially for promotional items and packaging
• Providing guidance – giving advice to internal teams on how to cut down on the use of plastic as well as suggestions for alternatives
• Working together – empowering our people to take action and make simple behavioural changes to reduce plastic waste

We’ve already made good progress with some of our initiatives

• Removed plastic tabs and document sheaths from our product packaging, saving nearly half a tonne of plastic*
• Started using smaller non-plastic lined paper bags in our retail stores
• Introduced drinks discounts for employees using reusable mugs in our canteens. We are in conversation with our catering supplier to explore further opportunities
• Our Virgin TV V6 box is made from 21% less material, including plastics, compared to the old TiVo box
• Our Events team are proactively working to a no single-use plastic policy – this includes not using balloons or bottled water for example

We’ve got plenty more activity underway, from removing plastic uniform packaging to cutting down plastic use in our canteens and across our logistics network. Virgin Media is also actively working towards achieving zero waste to landfill in our offices, having already achieved a zero waste to landfill logistics supply chain.

There’s plenty more to do to tackle the plastic problem, but we’re focussed on playing our part and tackling the most common uses of unnecessary plastic.

*saving in red tabs based on introduction of Virgin TV V6 packaging compared to TiVo packaging. Saving on document sheaths is forecast for April-December 2018