UK supermarket giant Marks and Spencer has become that country's first retailer to use a new environmentally-friendly packaging material made 50 percent from chalk.

The material, which will be used in butter wraps, was developed by Ecolean, originally part of liquid-packaging converter Tetra-Pak and now owned by Hans Rausing, former principal of Akerlund+Rausing, Sweden's biggest paperboard-packaging manufacturer.

Intended as a replacement for polypropylene and polyethylene wraps, Ecolean is not classified as plastic and is therefore cheaper to dispose of. Considered properly degradeable, it uses half as much petrochemical polymer and half the energy to manufacture of traditional packaging materials.

National Flexible, Ecolean's sales agent in the UK, says the material can also be used for packaging baked goods, snack foods, confectionery, and ready meals.