A crowd of parents and children from St Julian’s Church School, Wellow, went to Bath’s Odd Down Sainsbury’s Superstore on 2nd July to hand back "pointless" plastic packaging with messages to the supermarket written on them.

The group were inspired by BBC One’s three-part series War On Plastic, which called for citizens to speak out against unwanted plastic packaging in UK supermarkets by joining their seven-day #OurPlasticFeedback campaign.

Teachers at St Julian’s School had made single-use plastic packaging the subject of the school’s arts week, where children learned about the enormity of the plastics crisis and what we can all do to help end it. Using less plastic packaging was placed at the top of their agenda.

Supermarkets are responsible for one third of all plastic packaging used in the UK. The gathered parents and children explained that we therefore need them to take the lead and drastically reduce the amount of packaging we are all forced to buy from them.

The group were armed with banners reading “The only solution – stop pollution, it’s child’s play” and “Plastic is not so fantastic!” They stood outside the superstore, writing messages on their packaging that read “No more plastic please!”, “Enough now”, “What about reusable packaging?”, and included the #OurPlasticFeedback link, before entering to hand the plastic back to the store managers.

Inside the store, St Julian’s School teacher, Miranda Wells, led the team explaining that the children had completed a school project on plastics and wanted to know what Sainsbury’s were going to do with all this single use plastic packaging?

Store Manager, Rachel Brooks, said that Sainsbury’s had written information about their plans around plastic packaging online.

The group asked if the delivery of the plastic with their messages on could be relayed to the Sainsbury’s head office. Sainsbury’s employee, Jaimie McMillan, said that it would be, and that they could also take the packaging back for recycling, too.

One parent, Gair, claimed that recycling cannot be the answer to the plastics problem: “The recycling system can’t deal with all our recycling, which is why we need supermarkets to take the lead to reduce the plastic in the first place!”

Jaimie responded: “I totally agree with you. As a company, it’s something we’re looking at. There are different schemes we’re looking at to try and reduce the amount of plastic in the store and in the company as a whole.”

#OurPlasticFeedback is a nationwide campaign that is supported by Anita Rani, Mary Berry, Stephen Fry, Dermot O’Leary and Sir David Attenborough.