SUPERMARKETS should help packaging manufacture by insisting that suppliers use green corrugated materials, according to a firm celebrating an accolade for the way it trains its staff.

SCA Packaging, which employs 165 people at New Hythe, near Maidstone, has been granted Investors in People (IIP) status for a new shopfloor training programme.

It involved training trainers and producing manuals across the packaging manufacturing business. The company makes a wide range of products, including boxes for Pizza Hut takeaways.

Brian Miller, managing director, praised his team for embracing a process that promoted safety, quality, service and efficiency. It would also help the company produce packaging at the lowest possible cost.

This was critical as UK manufacturing declined. The loss of manufacturing to other countries meant falling demand for UK-made cardboard boxes.

Mr Miller said: "We make packaging so we need people to make things in the UK that they put into boxes, otherwise we don't have a business."

He called on supermarkets – recently criticised for too much packaging – to help. Suppliers that had switched to plastic containers should switch back to corrugated packaging, but that depended on supermarket chains promoting the switch.

Corrugated packaging had a recycling rate of 84 per cent and "a very good record of environmental credentials".

"As long as we can move into some really sensible debate on it, we believe our products come out very well."

In a devastating critique of the present state of UK manufacturing, which now employs fewer than three million workers nationwide, he added: "Too many people who make things leave the UK and that impacts on our market."

The overall market was "at best stagnant".