Dave Potts discusses how working with Castle Industrial Supplies has helped L’Oréal to reduce their plastic waste and help save them money. Find out more below.

“I’m Dave Potts, I’m the Order Prep Manager for L’Oréal here at the Trafford Park site where we’re responsible for two of our four divisions; consumer products & cosmetic active. We were challenged by the business at the beginning of 2020 to remove plastic consumables wherever possible and where it isn’t possible to try and reduce them.

It occurred to us that shrink wrap is the majority of our plastic. We dispatched 230,000 pallets per year from this distribution centre and we’d never really looked to see if the wrap that we’re using is the right thickness, whether we’re using too much of it or not enough of it. So we got in touch with Castle because they provided the full stability analysis so they’d be able to answer those questions for us and hopefully there’ll be some quick wins straight away.

So after Castle did the analysis we decided to choose the 10 micron nano wrap, we were previously using a 15 micron wrap from our previous supplier so straight away we saved 33% of plastic from switching to the to the nanowrap but then because of the properties we found that it was, and the analysis that Sean did, from Castle, we found that we were able to stretch that plastic a little bit further and the plastic saving was around 50% or 13 tons of plastic per year.

The other benefits that we’ve seen from switching to the new nanowrap are an improvement in quality; so all of the rolls that turn up are of great quality, we’re able to use them straight away, there are no faulty batches that arrive and most importantly from a cost perspective we’ve been able to reduce our spend on shrinkwrap by almost 50%.

I’d recommend Castle for a few reasons. Firstly, the load stability assessment that they offered to us without any commitment to purchase. This gave us the confidence that switching wraps would mean no adverse impact to our customers. Secondly, they were a pleasure to deal with, they came with a great price and they delivered the goods really quickly. And finally, Castle gave us their commitment to keeping us up to date on any advances within this sector including any biodegradable materials, increased recycled content so that we as a company can keep reducing plastic given the plastic and the financial savings that we’ve made here at Trafford Park from switching to the new nanofilm.

We’ve recommended Castle to our other two UK distribution centres and beyond that to L’Oréal operations centres throughout the world.“