Shoppers were urged yesterday to take direct action to force supermarkets to cut the excessive and wasteful packaging that goes direct from the shop shelf to the household bin. The environment minister Ben Bradshaw advised food shoppers to leave excessive wrapping at the tills and to report the stores to trading standards in an attempt to cut the amount of unnecessary plastic sent to landfill sites.
story from the Guardian.
I’d love to see it happening, though …
People have been advocating this for years. As in at least since I was a kid. Never seen anyone doing it though.
I refer you to my post of last night, which included the paragraph:
“Am also deeply curious – why, on a floor in a cubicle of the toilet in Tesco’s in Alfreton at lunchtime today, was there an open and empty packet of ready-to-cook battered calamari? Do they make good tampons, or something?”
and now I know the answer!
I do my best to avoid over-packaged products. Which is one reason I *won’t* buy food from M&S. I don’t want 4 apples (or WHY) shrink wrapped to a foam tray, and covered in sticky labels TYVM. I want to be able to select them myself.
Equally, Waitrose can be bad with some of their packaging – take a look at the packaging of their speciality sausages for example.
Alice.
I get an organic box from Riverford every week. Anything that doesn’t provide is sourced from a greengrocer. I won’t pay for horrible prepacked supermarket veg.
Where possible I use greengrocers, or I sometime go to Riverside Organics. However, sometimes it just isn’t possible. Which is when the stupormarkets (I should be a little more specific – Waitrose and Sainsbury) get used for greengrocery, they get used for other things anyway.
Alice.
I remember reading about – UN organised? – days of packaging stripping. I can’t remember where or when of course, but customers were striping off packaging and dumping it at the store. In Germany the store is responsible for dealing with the packaging and I beleive people routinely strip off packaging and dump boxes at the shop, to avoid having to recycle it at home.
As the stores don’t want to spend anything they don’t have to, I suppose they believe shoppers want enough wrapping that they can shove their avocados in with their tinned beans and get them both home safely. Some of it msut be to get stuff to the stores in good condition, but maybe if we all dump the packaging at the store they could switch to re-usable packaging that lives in the lorries? Wonder what Waitrose will say…