Parsimonious about packaging
17/02/09 12:27
Pay recycling costs, stores told
Less than half of the contents of the average shopping basket packaging is recyclable
UK supermarkets produce too much packaging, almost 40% of which is non-recyclable, local councils say.
The Local Government Association argues supermarkets should pay towards the collection of their packaging as an incentive to cut back.
In a survey of 29 common grocery items, it found Waitrose had the most wrapping while Tesco had the least.
But Waitrose said it had cut the weight of its packaging by a third since 2001 and believed the report was misleading.
Lidl had the least recyclable packaging on their products, Sainsbury's contained the most. BBC News Website.
As regular MoonBites readers will know I am a great fan of Waitrose and have thoroughly enjoyed working with them for many years. I greet today’s news story with mixed feelings - I know that food has to be packaged to arrive undamaged into store. But this is simply because it travels so far and we have got so used to all the preparation being done for us. If you strip away the outer leaves of a cauliflower in the field you will need to protect it on its journey to the customer. Leave the outer leaves on and the cauli unwrapped and, yes, you’ll have to cut the leaves off at home and compost them, but you will cut down on plastic packaging. The choice should be ours but it so often isn’t.
The answer to this story is simple - buy local food that doesn’t travel miles and doesn’t have to be packaged for safe transit. Yes, we need to know what to do with the food when we get it home if we haven’t been brought up to cook from scratch, but, with more and more people turning to the internet for all their information, that seems to be an easy problem to resolve.
The first supermarket that really starts to think about what the customers want and not what is easiest for them whilst offering excellent local fresh food in season will not only make a huge contribution to tackling food waste, food miles, climate change and peak oil, but will also truly become part of the local community through offering local food to people who are short of time and need a one-stop shop. Not everyone is driven by price, even in credit-crunch times. I know that central distribution is efficient in many ways but it is truly in the ways that are now beginning to matter so much, i.e. in terms of food miles and air quality? When we do spend money we want to be able to spend it in a way that reflects our values in a changing and challenging environment. The issue of packaging has been on the back boiler for too long.
It is not, however, simply the fault of the multiples that there is so much non-recyclable packaging about. Local Councils have been woefully slow in building recycling plants that can cope with the modern packaging. So, for example, Yeo Valley might say that their packaging is recyclable but, certainly here in Chichester, it is the Wrong Sort of plastic to be dealt with through the local system. I suspect that this will be a long-term problem and so, the only sensible way forward is for those of us who care to buy local, un-packaged food for most of the time when we are shopping. The answers to the problems caused by so many of us buying from multiple retailers are very complex and we, as consumers, must take some of the blame for having been seduced away from local shops in the first place. It may be that it will become a treat to buy something which is packaged - but then that will be accompanied by guilt and so we may cease to buy it altogether. Multiples Beware.
The dream answer? A local food shop in the middle of Chichester with affordable rents for a co-operative of local producers where eco-ideals are realisable for the good of the community. How many of us would like to shop there?