Tescos' recycling initiative, why so quiet?

A few days ago after using Tescos' online shopping service for the first time I was thinking to myself that it would be a good idea if Tesco offered to recycle all of the packaging for the products you buy from.

Basically if you get your shopping delivered by Tesco they currently offer to take back your old carrier bags to be recycled. I thought why not take it one step further and when they deliver your shopping they offer to take back all of the stuff that could be recycled from your last lot of shopping.

So I decided to send my thoughts to Tesco. First I hit there website trying to find some kind of contact information, after some searching I ended up on there corporate site, and it turns out that they have a section all about the environment.

I read through all of the information and I found something very interesting. Tesco are currently trialing recycling machines at there stores. These recycling machines allow the public to come along with bags full of stuff to recycle and they just put it all into the machine and it's automatically sorted and stored for them, you don't even have to do any sorting or anything.

Tesco press release about the machines

Now this is brilliant. It's making recycling much easier for people to do. The one thing that troubles me about it though is the fact that if I hadn't tripped over it so to speak I would have never known. Fair enough it's not in all Tesco stores at the moment but it is in some and they are planning a country wide roll out. Why isn't it being being covered by the media? After searching though google I found pretty much nothing about the story, about the only thing I did find was in the specialist press for the food industry and that was 2 years old from when they originally announced they were thinking about doing it.

Surely something like this should be getting more coverage, they even won the National Recycling Awards 2006. Yet for some reason we hear nothing. All we hear about is how recycling is 'too complex', and yet when someone comes along with an idea like this that would make recycling much less 'complex' it gets no coverage and no one gets to find out about it.

I just think it's a shame that this isn't being promoted more. I suppose that if it's still in a trial period Tesco might be holding back until they have it installed in more stores, but at the same time if more people knew about it then maybe they would see more public demand for what they will be offering.

I think companies should be shouting a bit more about what they are doing to help the environment, it might inspire the public in some way and could also encourage other companies to join in and start implementing environmental plans themselves.