Tesco has found itself at the centre of an eco-row over littering after plastic waste from one of its branches turned up on a local estate.
Residents were left outraged when a series of non-degradable blue plastic gloves started appearing on streets around a Tesco superstore and petrol station in Southampton – and the council have taken flak over the rubbish too.
Steve Plumridge, 59, slated the plastic waste on the South Coast city’s Tebourba Way as a “blight on the environment”, and has urged Tesco to take action.
Plumridge said: “This is about looking after the wildlife and the plastic gloves take years and years to decompose.
Steve Plumridge has urged Tesco to take action
“If Tesco was leaking oil into nature, it would be a massive story, so why isn’t this?”
The gloves are handed out at the 12-pump-strong petrol station for customers to keep their hands clean while refuelling.
Though Tesco offers six bins, that hasn’t appeared to stop the deluge of waste.
As well as the supermarket behemoth, the 59-year-old took aim at its patrons, who he accused of “not even bothering to pick it up”.
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Plastic gloves were causing a “blight on the environment” along Tebourba Way
Plumridge added: “They just think: ‘Oh, it’s not my job’ – so they don’t do it, but the staff in the petrol station also don’t do anything about it – they probably think it’s the cleaner’s job!
“The gloves then get blown by the wind and they end up settling in bushes and when the councilmen come to mow the grass they don’t even bother to get rid of the litter, they just mow over it.”
But staff at the petrol station didn’t come away blameless either – Plumridge said that despite raising the issue with workers, “some of them just laugh”.
In response to the criticism, a Tesco spokesperson said: “We provide gloves for customers’ use when filling up at our Southampton Superstore petrol station, and we encourage customers using them to dispose of them responsibly in one of the bins provided.”
Though the supermarket counselled customer responsibility, the row comes as Tesco continues to make large-scale environmental pledges.
On the retailer’s website, it states that it will have “removed plastic from five billion products” by 2025 as part of a push to boost recycling across its stores country-wide.
But despite axing the sale of disposable plastic bags in 2017 over environmental concerns, Tesco still hands out the gloves at petrol stations across the UK.