If you take a close look at the produce aisle of your grocery store, and look at the packaging instead of the vegetables and fruit, you’ll notice just how much plastic is in use.
Sliced mushrooms displayed on trays of polystyrene foam — a plastic now banned for use in takeout — and wrapped in plastic film, which soon won’t be collected in the blue box.
Peppers encased in clear plastic packaging, enticing you to pay less if you buy several.
“What they’re doing right now is just totally unsustainable from a waste perspective and from a plastics perspective,” says Karen Wirsig, plastics program manager for the Canadian organization Environmental Defence.
“If we’re trying to avoid food waste, then packaging things up and forcing me to buy 10 when I only need five is a terrible idea.”
Environmental Defence conducted an audit of 54 grocery stores across Canada — major grocery chains as well as independents — and found that 64 per cent of items in the produce, baby food, pet food and soup aisles were packaged in plastic. The group released its findings in April.
“The growth in this type of packaging works against the government goal to eliminate plastic waste by 2030,” according to the Environmental Defence report. “The increase in use of plastic packaging of all types also raises concerns about human — and particularly baby and toddler — exposure to chemical additives commonly found in plastic packaging, including phthalates and bisphenols.”
The federal government has banned some hard-to-recycle plastics used for takeout containers, as well as some other single-use plastics such as straws and ring carriers, as part of its goal to reach zero plastic waste by 2030. But aside from a ban on single-use plastic bags, there are no restrictions in grocery stores.
The government says it is “looking at the best way to manage the use of excess or unnecessary plastic packaging in grocery stores and will be publishing a discussion paper in the coming weeks for public comment,” according to an email from Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Canadians throw away three million tonnes — that is, three billion kilograms — of plastic waste every year, according to ECCC, and less than 10 per cent of it recycled.
Wirsig, who sits on a federal advisory committee looking at how to reduce plastic waste and pollution, says the government is considering a mandate of 50 per cent recycled content in plastic packaging, but may exempt food packaging because “it’s very difficult to get food-grade recycled plastic.”
Plastic, in general, can be difficult to recycle for a number of reasons.
Residential plastic waste is often contaminated by food, which devalues it because of the sorting that would be needed to remove the contaminated items. Plastic packaging can have numerous layers of materials, making it difficult to separate them for recycling. Canada lacks the physical infrastructure to scale up recycling. And environmentalists say that recycling plastic will release more chemicals and microplastics into the environment.
Environmental Defence has been pushing for reusable systems.
“Probably the most successful long-standing reuse and refill program that never has gone away is beer bottles,” says Wirsig, referring to the deposit return program at Ontario’s beer stores. “How could we adapt that to other things that come in jars? Or even cans with lids that can be resealed.”
One company that is trying to help producers reuse their packaging in grocery stores is Circulr, which offers a deposit system on glass jars used by more than 20 brands.
Consumers who return the jars to one of the company’s collection sites in Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph or Cambridge can reclaim a minimal deposit fee through an app. The company sanitizes the jars and returns them back to the same producers where possible, so that they can reuse them.
Circulr is working with a number of stores and brands, but has yet to scale up the program to put collection sites in one of the big grocery chains in Ontario, something that the company’s co-founder Charles Binks-Collier hopes to do this year.
Wirsig says grocery stores can be instrumental in reducing plastic packaging.
“They drive a lot of the packaging decisions. And they can drive that change too,” she says. “Certainly they should start with their own brands … But I think they need to also apply pressure” to other brands, she says.
“Loblaws was in a fight with Frito-Lay recently,” she says, noting a dispute over pricing between the grocery chain and the snack food producer that resulted in a shortage of the snack-maker’s wares on shelves for more than a month.
“You could have a fight about packaging.”
Wait until you see how much packaging is used in the back area before anything gets put on the shelf. Dealing with the customer-facing plastic use is a silly distraction compared to the dumpster full of the stuff out back. Never mind the amount of items deliberately destroyed and thrown away instead of selling at a significant discount or donating.
You’re right that it’s a complete misprioritization. It’d be one thing if this was in addition to what’s arriving to the store in the first place, but it always seems like this stuff is being used to completely distract from the real causes of that waste.
I never understood the idea of banning plastic grocery bags. Every single person I know reuses them or uses them as trash bags for small garbage bins.
Now, you have to PAY excessive amounts for a box of brand new plastic bags to use for the same purpose… not a single plastic bag has been spared from entering the landfill by banning them at grocery stores. Not to mention that stores like Walmart don’t even have appropriate carts for the bins I bring!
But as the article points out, now everything is excessively packaged in plastic at the grocery store! The other day I saw a single doughnut being sold in a hard plastic container… I mean, come on!
It was supposed to incentivize the purchase of reusable bags. Whether it’s done so is debatable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been using bins and reusable bags for years, even before stores forced you to use them, and even started using bike panniers to load up groceries or other store bought items.
But the difference now is that instead of reusing plastic grocery bags, I’m having to spend money buying brand new plastic bags.
In the end, I’m still using the same amount of plastic bags. -_-
Have you considered maybe not using a platic bag for your trash can?
For sure. We’ve drastically reduced how many bags we use, but it’s not always possible. Some bins don’t have bags, and a few others are designed to simply hold a bag (i.e. no bin), so they kind of need one.
But several others need a bag, not only for hygienic reasons, but also because I’d be wasting more resources on scrubbing them clean every time they are emptied.
I’ve seen small compostable plastic-like bags for home composting. Does something like that exist in trash can size?
Yes, we actually do use them! They are an added cost over the free bags we used to get, however. And they arent as durable or odor proof as actual plastic. Still, it has its uses so well continue to use them.
The issue with compostable bags in a landfill is that they arent designed to be there. So while they might decompose a little, they might also just stick around like regular plastic.
Maybe landfills of the future will better handle these types of bags, but there’s no harm in using them if you’ve got them 👍
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You don’t have to do any of those things. You’re just used to consumer creature comforts. Also, I’m calling bs on people you know using grocery store plastic bags as garbage bags. They always have holes in the bottom so you can’t do this.
Also, I’m calling bs on people you know using grocery store plastic bags as garbage bags. They always have holes in the bottom so you can’t do this.
I grew up in an Italian family and I remember my grandmother reusing grocery store bags! In fact, I even remember (as a kid in the 90’s) going to a friend of my mother’s to fold tons of these grocery bags into triangles so they can be easily stored and reused!
You do get holes in a few bags here and there, but you can save those for double-bagging later, or as a garbage bin bag that you don’t plan to put sand or liquid into.
Literally any other use is better than having to use a new garbage bag.
My kid commented to me the other day that removing plastic shopping bags seemed like a worthless gesture when the produce aisle was filled with rolls of plastic bags that were free of charge to customers AND a bunch of stuff already came pre-packaged in extra layers of unrecyclable plastic.
produce aisle was filled with rolls of plastic bags
Yeah, and they’ve made those produce bags so thin because they are trying to cut costs, that I have to double bag produce or risk losing them out the bottom of the bag.
I’m willing to bet that more plastic is entering landfills now than before.
Those statements conflict though. If the store buys thinner plastic bags to reduce costs, and more plastic is ending up in landfills as a result, then the store would have to be spending more on plastic bags.
Not really.
Just throwing out some (completely made up) numbers, but let’s assume that there are two options:
- High-quality bags, where you only need one. $0.10 each.
- Super-cheap bags, which would require the customer to double up to be safe. $0.03 each.
Using two super cheap bags would cost them $0.06 instead of $0.10. Hell, the customer could use three bags and still save them money, but with 3x more bags in the landfill with no chance to reuse them because of how shitty they are to begin with.
I have no idea what the actual numbers are, but having been in an industry where these decisions come up, I’m confident that the hypothetical above is accurate to how they do things.
And it’s not like I don’t appreciate the effort to save on material, like what Amazon has been doing with their boxes, but the use of these cheap bags isn’t doing anything but saving them money.
Right, but the volume of plastic entering landfills would have to be less now. While I appreciate that someone buying a half dozen peaches or tomatoes might need to double bag, the main purpose of those bags (at least in my mind) is to keep the contents separate from the other shopping items.
No one wants their lettuce brushing up against that box of laundry detergent, or their plastic wrapped chicken leaking all over a a loaf of bread.
I really hope that plastic entering landfills is down, I really do. I don’t want to use plastic bags, but since there are circumstances where I need to, I would rather reuse old grocery bags than buy new plastic bags.
For produce, I’ve also used reusable mesh bags, which do work. The problem is that it takes resources to clean those and they arent cheap. I also cant reuse them for something like pet poop.
Just drive your F150 to the grocery store, recycle your unrecyclable plastic and don’t worry about it.
I’ve long thought that a club that’s the opposite of the Costco model would be great. Pay a membership fee to get better prices on small quantities at a time. I really don’t need or want to find storage for these massive packages that last months. I would rather pay for YOU to store them for me, and I’ll just drop in every week or two as I need a refill.
I like that concept! I don’t have space in my home to buy in bulk. Normal grocery store quantities are usually more than I need, especially produce and fresh foods. (For example, I just want a few leaves of lettuce, not the whole head.) For me, it would be a lot less wasteful to be able to buy in small/micro quantities.
This isn’t a great argument since the whole point of plastics in food packaging is to preserve the food and reduce waste. Until someone develops a technology that can mitigate food spoilage without plastic packaging, it’s the most profitable option.
the whole point of plastics in food packaging is to preserve the food and reduce waste
That is far from self-evident. What is your source? Zero percent of the food I get from my farmer is wrapped in plastic and it keeps just as well. Everything I buy in a can keeps for decades. Likewise well sealed glass preserves. Unlike plastic, cans and jars can actually be recycled and jars can even be reused, so they offer significantly less waste than plastic alternatives.
Until someone develops a technology that can mitigate food spoilage without plastic packaging, it’s the most profitable option.
If the argument is, in fact, to prevent food spoilage, then we have plenty of solutions from compostable bags to rice-based food packaging.
But we also already do a LOT to prevent food spoilage… pasteurization, wax coatings, chemicals, irrigation, etc.
I mean, seriously, when the hell did we ever NEED to sell single cucumbers in plastic wrap or a bunch of tomatoes in a plastic bag or container? Never, but that’s what’s happening.
Go to any food market outside of North America and you don’t see individual fruits wrapped in plastic or put into small containers.
The issue is MONEY. Companies don’t want to do what’s best, they want to do what’s cheapest for them (i.e. more profitable) while offloading costs to consumers.
But circling back to compostable packaging, that STILL wouldn’t solve the issue of plastic bags at grocery stores, since consumers are still buying them for their garbage bins, pet waste, etc., rather than reusing the plastic bags they loaded their groceries in.
I’ve gotten my q-adjacent parent and multiple neighbors of American liberal persuasion to do this, and also paper bags! I don’t think it was a matter of conscience, more of practicality/pinching pennies, though. Either way!
That’s happening. I know if a company local to me that’s developing nanocoatings for paper exactly for this application.
But I also believe that not all plastic bags actually do much to preserve some produce. Peppers don’t need to be bagged. Nor do cucumbers need to come in a condom. String beans, bags of fruit, citrus mesh bags, all unnecessary.
Maybe the problem is the food waste to begin with. Maybe we don’t need to buy a month’s worth of anything at once.
Rural Canada is rough
I’d love for glass jars to be way more of a thing. Or even cardboard, as much as possible.
The devil’s advocate against glass is that it might be too heavy (which, well, that’s why we have carts, and most cities are so unwalkable that most people aren’t carrying them home in their hands). A really pushy plastic lobbyist could probably try some “Think of the children” take against broken jars, but some brands might be into the premium look of glass for their products.
But cardboard seems like the best thing. We don’t actually recycle enough of our paper, and having a stand of flat boxes that you can quickly put together with the same capacity as those fruit/vegetable bags could be another step forward. They can even replace the foam/plastic wrap packaging by just popping the top flap open to see the green beans inside or whatever. And aren’t we trying to boost our paper manufacturing industry in Canada? There ya go - it’s cardboard time
To add to your devil’s advocate against glass, the extra weight also means more carbon emissions to transport. Recycling of glass is sort of a nightmare too, although if we standardized some of the shapes they could be washed and reused instead of trying to recycle.
Well, that’s all true, but that’s very much based on trying to change things in a vacuum.
More carbon emissions? Yes, if we stick with today’s methods of transportation. So much progress keeps getting hamstrung to find cleaner ways of moving forward, in addition to the poor working conditions of those operating those modes of transportation. But through systemic changes, that could change. Carbon emissions might go up, but so could taxes or fines related to that pollution and inefficiencies. I know everybody rolls their eyes when that gets mentioned, but the lack of teeth behind it is often because those taxes or fines get hamstrung too. A larger transformation of shipping and transportation is well overdue, and the greater need to combat rising fuel costs to ship weightier products might lead to investments in more fuel efficient (or alternative fuel-based) vehicles on ground, water, or in the air. :)
And standardizing them - yes, absolutely! That’s the systemic transformation. Especially once the use of glass goes up and the need to more efficiently recycle it can’t be ignored any more, those are the changes you’d expect to see!
Surely glass would increase the cost as well.
In theory, you could have reusable glass jars – like milk jars back in the day. You’d go to the store with empty containers, and return with full ones. In practice, that’s a logistical (and possibly healthcode) nightmare.
While I agree there’s a huge amount to do, I think it’s wise to just find places where plastic use is superflous and visible, and target those first. Now that plastic shopping bags are being eliminated, the next step is to start attacking packaging.
This is a bigger and harder task, but we’ve learned some lessons and developed some good products in the process of replacing plastic bags, so hopefully we’re more prepared than we were before.
We don’t even need a new solution. We can just do what we did before plastic was invented.
Not have supermarkets? I think there’s a pretty strong correlation between the proliferation of single use plastic and supermarkets.
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I feel like there are much worse offenders of plastic usage than the thin plastic bags you get at the produce aisle. Sooooo many things are now packaged in plastic that used to be packaged in cardboard or glass or aluminum, all of which recycle much better than plastic. I mean hell, even just reduce the amount of useless plastic on packaging to make it look bigger or fancier.
I try my best to reduce my plastic usage and recycle so I can sleep at night, but it seems pointless when it seems like people only focus on the most miniscule pointless shit when there are glaring issues in front of us
Governments need to put pressure on large corporations and incentivize using recyclable and compostable options. Until the government starts imposing fees or fines on use of non recyclable and non compostable options, well to put it nicely, capitalists are gonna capitalize and use the easier option of pouring more waste into our landfills.
Lol, they are trying to get rid of it but no one wants rotten produce, I wonder why?
What about mycelium plastics? https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41292 I don’t understand why companies aren’t investing in r&d wrt this.
Why spend R&D when you have something that works? Companies don’t care about anything that they aren’t legally forced to care about.
My wife actually works for a packaging supplier for grocery stores, butchers, and restaurants. She has spearheaded an initiative to bring in alternative options like PVA based bags, bamboo takeout containers, etc. They cost a couple cents more than the plastic stuff so none of their customers are on board.
That’s just heartbreaking.
That’s the truth.
We are increasingly buying our groceries at a local fruits & veggies market for a couple of reasons: The produce are fresher, are bigger, look and taste better for some reason and don’t come wrapped in any kind of plastic packaging with a very few exceptions. Oh and also it’s cheaper.
We’ve also started to get more and more dried goods, liquids and detergents from local bulk shops. For a little box of deluxe mixed salted nuts at the grocery store, I’d pay nearly 20$. In bulk it’s a fraction of the price. Plus, I use reusable containers so it reduces waste.
Yeah, one thing I noticed when I worked retail was the absurd amount of excessive plastic that was used in everything. We need to start seeing some regulations with teeth if we want to start curbing this problem.
Half of all fast food restaurants are still using plastic straws. So even the “super easy barely an inconvenience” part of Canada’s climate change strategy isn’t even being enforced.
Last time I heard, 70% of plastic waste is specifically fishing nets.
What’s the percentage gain if no one ever used a plastic bag again?
Given the vaaaasst majority of plastic waste is completely out of reach by this plan, I’m curious just how penny-wise were being.
I mean, yeah, keep it up. But maybe let’s keep also working toward something significant if it’s important.
