Garbage in the food trucks

The UK’s largest retail chain is now using its food-delivery trucks to pick up garbage from its stores in an attempt to save money.

Supermarket giant Tesco is no longer using waste-disposal contractors to pick up and dispose of trash—including unsold food—from its 600 biggest stores, according to an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Instead, bags of garbage are stacked in wheeled metal cages lined with plastic and picked up by the chain’s food-delivery trucks after they have dropped off all their food at Tesco stores. The garbage is dumped at a waste-disposal center, and the trucks go back to distribution centers to pick up more food for delivery.

“[N]otices posted at Tesco’s recycling center … suggest only a quarter of the delivery fleet is sanitized or washed each week,” the article said, adding that a “source close to the process said the thin plastic used to line the cages … was easily damaged so that liquid from putrefying rubbish could spill onto the floor” of the trucks.