Max the Bunny has lost weight. Last year M&S's best-selling chocolate animal inhabited a 2ft-high plastic circular drum made up of three pieces of rigid polymer and cardboard. This year the Easter rabbit with the ghastly rictus grin comes in a simple lightweight vacuum bag made of thin film that can be recycled. Max's "burrow" now weighs just a 10th what it did.

The M&S bunny is not alone. The wrapping and packaging for the majority of the 100m Easter rabbits, chicks, lambs and eggs, which are expected to be bought and eaten this year in Britain, have all been slimmed down as chocolate makers have cut their packaging. Cadbury claims to have reduced packaging by 25%, Marks & Spencer by almost 30%, Green and Black's by more than 60% and Thorntons by 22%. Nestlé said it had saved 700 tonnes of packaging by swapping plastic for cardboard. Mars claimed to have saved 108 tonnes of wrapping materials.

Repak has urged consumer to recycle all used Easter packaging from cardboard and plastic to aluminium foil wrapping.

The recycling agency estimates an extra 42,000 tonnes of used packaging from cards, beverage and other materials is generated over the Easter period.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/easter-eggs-packaging-reduced