Plastic has earned its place in retail supply chains for good reasons. It's light, strong, relatively inexpensive and remarkably good at protecting products from moisture, dirt and damage.
A pallet gets another few turns of stretch film because that's how it has always been wrapped. Bubble wrap remains the default for fragile
products even though paper alternatives are now available. A large shipping carton gets filled with plastic cushioning because nobody has revisited the box size. Individually, none of these decisions looks particularly significant. Multiply them across thousands of orders, hundreds of pallets and an entire retail network, and the picture changes quickly.
For UK retailers in 2026, there's another reason to take a closer look. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging is changing how packaging waste is accounted for, while England's Simpler Recycling reforms will extend recyclable collections to plastic film and bags from 31 March 2027. Packaging data, recyclability and material choices are becoming harder to treat as somebody else's problem.
Reducing single-use plastic does not mean declaring war on every roll of stretch film in the warehouse. A better strategy is to find the plastic that isn't earning its keep, replace it where practical, and optimise what still performs an essential job.
Start With the Packaging Nobody Questions
The best place to begin is often the least exciting: take a walk through the operation and look at what gets used every day.
Stretch film around inbound and outbound pallets is an obvious candidate, but keep going. Look at void fill, protective wrapping, pallet liners, edge protection, mailing materials and the secondary packaging used to move stock between stores or distribution centres.
Then ask what each component actually does. If removing a material would expose a product to damage, contamination or instability, it clearly has a purpose. If nobody can quite remember why it's there, you've probably found something worth investigating.
This distinction matters because plastic reduction should not come at the expense of product protection. Damaging a £100 product to save a few grams of packaging is poor economics and an equally questionable sustainability strategy. The objective is to use enough material to perform the job properly, without allowing "enough" to quietly become "we've always done it this way".
Swap Plastic Protection Where Paper Can Do the Same Job
Protective packaging is one of the easiest places to find practical alternatives.
Plastic bubble wrap has traditionally been the obvious choice for delicate products. Modern paper systems now provide another option, particularly for ecommerce, retail fulfilment and products where surface protection matters.
grip® PaperFlex uses an expandable paper structure that wraps around products and provides cushioning without conventional plastic bubble wrap. For retailers dispatching cosmetics, homeware, gifts, ceramics or other delicate goods, this can remove a familiar source of single-use plastic while keeping the packing process straightforward.
Empty carton space presents a similar opportunity. Allpack's Paper Void Fill Solutions can be used for cushioning, blocking and bracing products in transit, while systems such as BoxFill™ make paper dispensing practical at a busy packing bench.
The important part is testing the alternative against the real product and journey. A material only deserves the word "sustainable" if it can do its job reliably.
Look Inside the Pallet, Not Just Around It
Stretch film is an interesting case because simply replacing it isn't always the smartest way to reduce plastic.
Sometimes the bigger opportunity is to make the pallet require less film in the first place. Products slide against one another during braking, cornering, vibration and repeated handling. If there is little friction between pallet layers, stretch film has to work harder to contain that movement. The understandable response on the warehouse floor is to add another turn of film. Then perhaps another for luck.
CrabSheet™ Anti-Slip Pallet Liners tackle the problem from inside the load. Their slip-resistant surface increases friction between pallet layers, reducing product movement before the outer wrapping is applied. Used correctly, that gives retailers another lever for improving load stability without automatically reaching for more plastic.
Edge protection can work on the same principle. Edge PRO-TEC™ solidboard protectors can protect vulnerable corners and spread strapping pressure without relying on additional plastic protection.
This is where a good plastic-reduction programme starts to become more sophisticated. You're no longer replacing plastic item for item. You're redesigning the packaging system, so less of it is necessary.
Get More Performance From the Plastic You Keep
There will still be applications where plastic is the right material.
Pallet wrapping is an obvious example. Stretch film is efficient, light and exceptionally useful for securing goods in transit. Removing it without a suitable alternative could increase load failures and product damage, which rather defeats the purpose.
The better question is whether you're using more than necessary. High-performance grip® Film is designed to provide strong cling and load stability with reduced material use. Vortex™ pallet wrap provides another option for operations looking to incorporate recycled content into their pallet wrapping specification.
Application matters too. Two operators can wrap the same pallet and use noticeably different amounts of film, particularly when tension is controlled largely by feel. Equipment such as the grip® Hi-Lo Applicator can make manual application more consistent, while higher-volume sites may find that Robopac™ pallet wrapping systems offer greater control over film use and wrapping programmes. The goal isn't zero plastic at any cost. It's fewer grams doing more useful work.
Don't Ignore the Box
One of the simplest ways to reduce protective packaging is to give yourself less empty space to fill.
Retailers with broad product catalogues often accumulate carton sizes over time. New products arrive, old ranges disappear, but the box specification survives. Eventually a warehouse can find itself shipping relatively small products inside cartons chosen years earlier for completely different order profiles.
That unused volume has consequences. More void fill is required, parcels occupy additional warehouse and vehicle space, and products have greater room to move unless they're properly secured.
A carton review can therefore reduce packaging without replacing a single material. Look at actual order profiles rather than individual SKUs. Which products are commonly purchased together? Where are operators routinely adding large amounts of void fill? Are there carton sizes that barely get used, while others are repeatedly too large?
Right-sizing isn't particularly glamorous, but that's part of its appeal. Some of the best packaging improvements are wonderfully boring.
Reuse Deserves More Attention
Single-use plastic reduction does not always require switching material. Sometimes the answer is to stop treating durable packaging as disposable. Retail supply chains often contain closed or semi-closed loops between distribution centres, stores, suppliers and manufacturing sites. Those environments can make reusable transport packaging much more practical than it would be for a one-way ecommerce delivery to a consumer.
Totes, containers, pallet covers and other durable formats can potentially make repeated journeys before reaching the end of their useful life. The economics depend heavily on return rates, cleaning requirements, transport distances and loss, so reuse needs proper modelling rather than optimistic assumptions.
Where the loop works, though, the calculation changes completely. Instead of asking whether paper or plastic is preferable for one journey, procurement teams can ask how many journeys the same packaging can make.
Make the Customer's Recycling Job Easy
Recyclability on a specification sheet and recyclability in somebody's kitchen are not always the same thing.
A customer who receives a carton, paper cushioning and paper wrapping has a fairly obvious task at disposal. Mixed materials, detachable plastic components and specialist recycling instructions introduce more opportunities for confusion.
England's recycling system is moving towards greater consistency. Households have been subject to the new Simpler Recycling framework since 31 March 2026, and plastic film packaging and bags are due to join plastic recycling collections from 31 March 2027.
That forthcoming change makes flexible plastic recycling more practical, but it doesn't remove the value of simplification. If retailers can reduce the number of materials customers need to separate without compromising protection, the end-of-life experience becomes considerably easier.
Packaging design therefore needs to consider what happens after delivery, not merely whether something is technically recyclable.
Use EPR Data as a Management Tool, Not Just a Reporting Task
EPR gives larger retailers another reason to understand precisely what packaging moves through their businesses. Current government guidance requires affected organisations to collect and report packaging data, with requirements varying according to organisation size and activities.
It would be a shame to collect all that information purely to satisfy a reporting requirement. Packaging data can reveal where plastic is concentrated across the supply chain. Once material weight is mapped against product categories, suppliers, fulfilment sites or packaging formats, procurement teams can see which interventions are likely to matter and which would barely move the needle.
That makes targets more useful too. "Reduce plastic" is vague. Reducing stretch-film consumption per pallet, eliminating plastic void fill from a particular ecommerce line or increasing recycled content within a defined packaging category gives teams something they can actually measure.
The UK EPR framework is also continuing to develop. Government guidance updated in July 2026 points producers assessing 2026 packaging towards the current recyclability assessment materials, with separate guidance already published for the 2027 reporting year.
For retailers, packaging specification and packaging data are increasingly part of the same conversation.
The Best Plastic Reduction Plans Aren't Particularly Dramatic
There is an understandable temptation to search for one large change that suddenly makes a supply chain sustainable. Real warehouses rarely work like that.
Meaningful reductions are more likely to come from twenty smaller decisions: a better-sized carton here, paper void fill there, less stretch film on a stable pallet, recycled content where plastic remains necessary, and reusable packaging on routes where the return loop makes sense.
That approach also gives operations teams room to test changes properly. Packaging can be trialled against real loads, transit damage can be monitored and material consumption can be compared before a new specification is rolled out across the network.
The result is less exciting than announcing that plastic has disappeared overnight. It is also considerably more credible.
For retailers, the aim should be a supply chain in which every piece of single-use plastic has a defensible reason for being there. Anything that doesn't should be an obvious candidate for redesign, reduction or replacement.
Get in Touch
If you're reviewing single-use plastic across your retail or ecommerce operation, Allpack can help you identify where material can be removed, replaced or used more efficiently without putting products at greater risk.
From Paper Void Fill Solutions and grip® PaperFlex to CrabSheet™ Anti-Slip Pallet Liners, high-performance stretch films and automated pallet wrapping, we can help you review the complete packaging system rather than simply swapping one product for another.
Send us a message, speak to the team or email sales@allpack.uk.com to discuss where practical plastic reductions could be made across your operation.