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With plastic packaging being highlighted in our news stories more and more, people are becoming more aware of the damages that plastic is doing to the environment. The UK and the US throw away around 550 million plastic straws every day, which each one taking around 500 years to decompose. With so much plastic being thrown into the ocean and into dumps, which won’t decompose in ours or even our children’s lifetimes, it’s time to try and find an alternative and support stores that already use less plastic packaging.
Kirkgate Markets Leeds ~
With the most diverse options and least packaging, Kirkgate markets blows both its contenders out of the water on those fronts. With hardly a plastic bag in sight, all the of the markets fruit and vegetable stalls use barely any plastic to package their stock. Most of the stalls also only gave a brown bag option to pick your own produce, instead of the plastic bags that are offer in major supermarkets. It seems common for local fruit and vegetable vendors to not sell produce with pointless plastic packaging as it just adds to the cost and is not needed.
Aldi ~
Being one of the most ‘ethical’ UK supermarkets, it was expected that Aldi would use somewhat less packaging compared to rivals such as Morrisons, but this wasn’t the case. All the fruit and vegetables were wrapped in plastic, without giving much option for picking your own produce and placing in your own bag, like other supermarkets do. Even vegetables such as broccoli are wrapped tight in plastic which isn’t always implemented across other major supermarkets, making it seamlessly useless. However, Aldi does seem to be taking steps to reduce their plastic waste. Their websites states that they have ‘always been committed to tackling waste, and helping our customers do the same, to minimise our impact on the environment’ and they have created their own ‘packaging reduction strategy’ which will make their own-brand products completely ‘recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2022’. Hopefully this attempt at reducing their waste will help the environment and will make them a more ethical company.
Morrisons ~
Although Morrisons offered most of it’s fruit and vegetables to be bought without any packaging, there was still a significant amount of packaging used. With a large section of the store dedicated to fruit and vegetables, while it may seem that there is a large amount of produce without packaging, in comparison with other supermarkets Morrisons still continues to use just as much packaging, but just haves extra produce without any. However, Morrisons is attempting to ditch the excess packaging, with them reducing the amount of packaging in the fresh food section by 36% since 2009.
While companies are clearly trying to lower their impact on the environment, it’s clear just by walking around stores that there is still a lot of unnecessary waste that could be easily disposed of. Recently customers have even taken it upon themselves to make a statement over the pointless amount of packaging companies us. Protesters in Bath left behind all the useless plastic packaging around their food at the shopping tills in Tesco, to show the supermarket that they use too much plastic that isn’t necessary. Hopefully major companies can make significant changes to help save the environment and cut down on the annoying excess waste that comes with simple produce.