The UK’s advertising regulator has banned the ad of an artificial grass supplier claiming one of its products is “recyclable” while implying it was also ‘eco-friendly’.

In May, Perfectly Green tweeted that its “Soul Eco-grass” product was recyclable.

Environmental group, Plastics Rebellion, challenged whether the claim that the product was recyclable was misleading and whether the product’s name misleadingly implied that the product was eco-friendly.

Perfectly Green said that this product was manufactured from materials that belonged to the polyolefin family of polymers, namely polyethylene and polypropylene.

They understood that polyolefins could be recycled by pyrolysis or gasification and that their chemical composition and structure made them a potentially useful source of hydrocarbons or carbon atoms.

The company also said the technical specification of the product meant that they were entitled to name it “Eco-grass”.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the ad was misleading on the basis that the name of the product would be understood by consumers to mean that the product was environmentally friendly.

The ASA said: “Due to the absence of any qualifications noting the difficulties posed to the recycling of the product due to its mixed composition and the lack of existing UK infrastructure to process it once it had reached the end of its life cycle, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”

Article source: https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/11/16/plastic-grass-is-not-green-says-uk-regulator/