https://globalnews.ca/news/9872512/canada-plastic-food-packaging-waste/
The federal government is calling for input from grocers, food and beverage producers, provincial governments and the general population.
The federal government is calling for input from grocers, food and beverage producers, provincial governments and the general population.
While the plastic gadgets are wasteful, they don't hold a candle to all the unnecessary food packaging that's used. Just tear apart one of your garbage bags, and see how much is food-related packaging and how much is gadgets.
I visited the US (WV) recently, and I was appalled by how much waste goes unrecycled. At home (Europe) our family produces one bag of unrecycled waste every 2 weeks, in WV we produced 6 bags in 2 weeks, and that's while living in European style (refillable water bottles, declining plastic bags for groceries, buying unpackaged produce, etc.).
Nearly every food item on the shelf has plastic. Aluminum cans are lined with plastic on the inside, glass bottles have a plastic freshness seal/cap. Even pasta boxes, one of the few cardboard packaged goods that don't have an inner plastic liner often have a little plastic window so you can see what the pasta looks like.
And yet we're being told that plastic bags are the problem. Literally the only plastic thing you get from the grocery store that isn't single use. Instead we have paper bags which are bulkier and have a higher carbon footprint, and we still end up with a bunch of actually single use plastic bags because we no longer have anything to use as small garbage bags.
The carbon foot print is debatable, but plastic in the environment is basically there forever, where a paper bag breaks down relatively quickly and natural processes can deal with cellulose.
I'd moved into a house and noticed a plastic bag stuck on a branch high up on a tree. When I moved 11 years later, the bag was still there, showing essentially no signs of deterioration, even after 11+ years of exposure to sunlight and seasons that vary from -35C to +35C.
Paper bags can be used as garbage bags as long as the garbage isn't soup. Mum did it back in the 1960s and 1970s until plastic bags replaced the traditional paper bag. We're both back to using paper bags for garbage.
The last plastic bags that my grocery store used were so thin that they almost always had holes in them and leaked, so there weren't appreciably better in that respect than paper.
I'm old enough to remember that grocery store only had paper bags, and replaced them with plastic bags because we were using too much paper and it was killing all the trees.
Now we're back to paper bags...
That was a lie. I worked in groceries back in the 90s and the store owner said that the paper sacks cost him 5 cents and the plastic bags were less than 1 cent each... So stop handing out paper unless people ask for it!
I did not know that. I was a kid in the 1970s/80s when the change came to the part of Canada I grew up in... and I remember it as a "too many trees chopped down" thing. Did some digging and... damn...
Yeah, greenwashing is a huge thing. Most everything corporations do for "the environment" is bullshit used to place the problems on the individual consumers and not the actual perpetrators. Companies only care about that money.
That was a marketing campaign by the petrochem industry to get plastic bags into stores, and it worked.
No one gives a shit about the carbon footprint of bags. It's negligible.
What matters is the amount of waste produced, and a sizable chunk of that IS made up of bags.
@nathris @Ondergetekende Until it closed a few months ago we had a Zero-Waste bulk food store in town and it was where I got a majority of my non produce items: pasta, dried beans, lentils, nooch, bulk spices. (and they were the only place in town with vean meat alts in bulk like Byond and Impossible).
As a fall-back we go to the regular Bulk Barn type place it has a wider selection and thankfully have started allowing tared u-bring containers again.
Its bit of an art being zero-waste.
The Bulk Barn's near me have "Sustainable Sundays", and you get 15% off on products you get in your own containers.
Definitely a good idea to reduce plastic waste, but I think that putting too much emphasis on grocery packaging can miss the mark. For things like food, it is important to be able to have things sealed for freshness or food safety. The unnecessary waste in my mind comes more from things like packaging of other products, like showy retail clamshell packaging that’s significantly larger than the item being sold, or that only exists as a marketing gimmick to make things look good on retail shelves.
A good model is some things from Amazon that just gets shipped in plain cardboard because that’s more recyclable/renewable than plastic. I also feel that the efficiency of having large warehouses, even when the items are shipped individually is better than having to have a whole retail supply chain that involves creating an appealing retail space. Especially if someone is making a trip in a vehicle to pick up just a couple retail items. Another good example is something like the Lee Valley model where many items don’t have significant packaging at all, and they use a smaller show-room style retail space supplemented by more efficient warehousing storage in the back. Lee Valley even has a program to collect and re-use shipping boxes so they can be directly used multiple time before getting put through a recycling process.
In a lot of ways, it’s up to the consumer to make buying choices based on the sustainable practices of the business they choose to frequent. Just blaming the business for the waste created by the service that their customers choose to use is just kicking the can down the road. If we chose to shop at businesses with sustainable practices or buy products with more sustainable packaging it would create a clear financial incentive for other businesses to follow suit.
on the sunshine coast, we introduced composting service. my family of three produces about one large bag every 2 weeks (plus extras due to ongoing renos). it made a huge difference!