Closing the Loop: How Twinplast Helps Royal Mail Reuse, Not Replace

Sustainability can feel a bit vague at times. You hear the terms - recycling, circular economy - but it’s not always obvious what that looks like in practice.

This is one of those cases where it’s actually quite straightforward.

Twinplast supplies corrugated plastic sheets used to line Royal Mail’s cages (commonly referred to as 'Yorks'), helping protect parcels as they move through the network, via sorting offices and National Distribution Centres.

Over time, those sheets take a fair amount of wear. They get marked, damaged, and eventually need replacing.

Instead of being discarded, the used plastic sheets are collected and returned to us. We shred them down and process the material back into raw plastic pellets, which are then used to manufacture new corrugated sheets.

So the same material goes back into the same product. Not something different, just reused for its original purpose.

On average, around 250 tonnes of plastic is recycled this way every month.

Recycling plastic reduces the need for new raw material, which in turn lowers emissions and energy use. Studies suggest recycled plastics can cut carbon emissions by around 40% to 70% compared to producing virgin material.

In simple terms, recycling one kilogram of polypropylene can avoid roughly 1.3 kg of CO₂ emissions.

At scale, that starts to make a noticeable difference.

There’s a lot of talk about circular systems, but this is really just that in action. The material stays in use, rather than being replaced.

It’s not a perfect system - nothing is - but it’s a practical one. And sometimes that’s what matters most.