Plenty of people want to reduce their use of plastic packaging. After all, it amounts to bringing trash home. Food packaging accounts for a lot of it. But grocery stores have made it hard, up till now, to avoid plastic packaging. It seems that more and more products come in plastic that used to be packed in something else.

About a third of all the plastic produced every year becomes trash after a single use. Much, if not most, of that plastic becomes packaging. And the EPA estimates that packaging accounts for nearly a quarter of the trash in landfills. Not all that packaging is plastic, but plastic causes more than its share of environmental problems.

The good news? The tide is about to change.

Lately, a few zero-waste grocery stores have sprung up all over the world. And major grocery chains are beginning to look at plastic reduction to meet their sustainability goals. Some companies have started to experiment with bioplastics, although not without controversy.

It may take years to reach a tipping point and see plastic bottles, jars, bags, and wrappers disappear from grocery store shelves. But at least the process has started.

Why does the food packing industry use plastic?

Plastic became the solution of choice for several different problems in the food chain.

Grocery stores get food from all over, not just local farmers. Some fruits and vegetables begin to spoil soon after they’re picked. They have to survive the time and distance between the field and the store shelves. Wrapping a cucumber in plastic, for example, slows down the process of decay. It cuts down on the number of cucumbers the store will have to throw out. Discarding spoiled produce eats into very slim profit margins.

Even for less fragile produce, simply piling it in a carton caused too much damage. So now, packers place each pear, for example, in a molded plastic tray. Each tray has a space to keep all the pears separate from the others. Each carton has several layers of trays.

Granola in a box with a plastic inner sleeve keeps longer than bulk granola—or than granola in a box without the sleeve. The grocery stores have to discard stale bulk products and eat the costs. If the granola goes stale at home, the customer bears the cost.

Shipping long distances entails transportation costs. Plastic bottles and jars have begun to replace glass. They are much lighter than glass and less breakable. At first, milk came in plastic instead of glass. Then products like pasta sauce and apple sauce. Lately, I’ve even seen extra-virgin olive oil in plastic bottles! But the grocery chains pay less for shipping these lighter containers.

Benefits of plastic packaging for consumers

Once most consumers had cars and refrigerators, their shopping habits changed. Instead of walking to the store every day or two to get what they’d use up quickly, they started driving there once a week.

They bought more at a time, too. Where earlier consumers bought groceries by the armload, modern consumers buy by the trunk load. So they have their own reasons for wanting groceries to last longer. Consumers value freshness.

Some excesses that caused a backlash

Grocery stores have packaged cut fruits and vegetables in plastic clamshells for years. When Whole Foods offered pre-peeled oranges in 2016, it sparked such outrage it had to apologize to its customers and withdraw the product.

Whole Foods has an eco-friendly reputation, and the peeled oranges clashed with it.

Ripe avocados turn brown and disgusting after being peeled faster than most fruits.  Calavo, a California-based avocado grower, began to offer peeled avocados with the seed removed.

To make it work, it had to use heavier plastic than the normal clam-shell container and keep it in contact with the fruit on all sides. Then, it encased that plastic in cardboard.

The internet exploded with outrage, but in this case, it has not resulted in the elimination of the product.

A solution not ready for prime time

Ekoplaza, a supermarket in Amsterdam, claims to have an entire aisle with no plastic packaging. Besides glass and metal containers, it has food in what certainly looks like plastic. But it’s made of compostable materials. Plant cellulose, corn starch, and other biological materials make bioplastics.

Unfortunately, bioplastics do not quite fulfill their sustainable intentions. For one thing, consumers will likely discard them instead of composting them.

Bioplastic containers are not recyclable. If they get into the ocean, they do not biodegrade under those conditions. As litter on land, they can still kill wildlife the same way comparable plastic products do.

And instead of using fossil fuels to make plastic, the bioplastics require food products. Sugar and corn grown to make packaging are not available for food.

Bioplastics do not use any less resources, just different ones. And containers with up to 80% regular plastic resins can legally count as biodegradable.

Consumers can put some bioplastics in their own compost piles, but others break down only in industrial facilities. No labeling so far clarifies which is which.

If grocery stores want to eliminate plastic packaging, they have to eliminate it. They can’t keep the appearance of plastic if the substitutes share the same problems. Ultimately, consumers and stores must nudge each other along and feel out ways so that both can move away from single-use packaging.

The zero-waste grocery concept

Consumers have become increasingly aware of the problems caused by disposable plastic. They have provided the pressure behind campaigns to ban plastic bags and plastic drinking straws.

Consumers have also inspired the concept of zero-waste grocery stores. The first ones opened in Europe a little more than ten years ago. Now, there are some on every inhabited continent.

Zero-waste stores require their customers to plan more rigorously than traditional grocery stores. No one carries around empty glass jars on the chance they might want to pop into a grocery store. And a pound of pinto beans in a glass jar weighs more than those same beans in a plastic bag. So far, then, zero-waste stores are impractical for people without cars.

At Precycle, an organic grocery store in Brooklyn, shoppers find everything they’d find in any other organic grocery. Except for plastic. Its owner, Katarina Bogatireva, sought to eliminate not only the plastic customers could see but also the plastic stores discard before putting items on the shelves.

Selling in bulk seems an obvious way to cut down on the plastic used for packaging. But most bulk stores I have encountered set out plastic containers for customers’ use.  Bogatireva had to provide non-plastic alternatives for customers who didn’t bring their own bottles and jars from home.

She couldn’t find any supplier who could package individually sized blocks of tofu in anything but plastic. The best she could do was a supplier who delivers bulk tofu in five-gallon plastic buckets and takes them back when empty. But at least she got rid of single-use plastic packaging for tofu.

Zero-waste delivery

A company called Loop has announced zero-waste online food shopping. It promises to deliver brand-name products in reusable packaging.

Partners who provide the containers include such large companies as Nestle and Procter & Gamble. When customers finish the product, they will simply return the container. The Loop delivery driver will pick them up and take them to be washed and refilled.

Loop has reinvented the bygone milkman, who delivered milk in reusable glass bottles.

Chain stores and plastic packaging

Nearly every large corporation today has a sustainability plan. For grocery chains, it includes reducing food waste and packaging waste.

Don’t look for any of them to adopt plastic-free zero-waste policies any time soon, but they’re not standing still, either.

For example, zero-waste groceries sell both non-plastic shopping bags and reusable containers for their bulk goods. Some chains, Aldi for one, already require customers to pay for bags. That gives even people who choose plastic bags incentive to bring them back to the store and reuse them. Don’t be surprised if other chains follow suit.

On the other hand, Kroger, America’s largest grocery holding company, has recently decided to phase out plastic bags. It operates more than a dozen different chains. Before that decision, its various stores sent its customers home with 6 billion plastic bags every year. Kroger has also promised to use 10 million pounds less plastic in 2020 for packaging its own brands.

Other chains have their own waste reduction plans. Wegman’s, a much smaller chain along the East Coast, plans to reduce its use of plastic by 2 million pounds in 2019 and 10 million pounds by 2024. Besides its packaging goal, it plans to stop using straws and other single-use plastic.

Eliminating plastic packaging is more difficult than it sounds. The plastic in packaging tea bags, for instance, keeps the tea fresh for months. Science is working on biodegradable alternatives, but so far, none preserve freshness as long. Similar challenges face replacing other kinds of plastic packaging. The pace of scientific progress can seem awfully slow to anyone not familiar with the challenges.

Our part in reducing plastic packaging.

Meanwhile, as consumers, we can influence the pace of these changes. Get and use a supply of reusable shopping bags.

Choose products that have the least plastic packaging. I shop at various stores according to their weekly specials. But I always buy apple sauce at the only store that still sells it in glass. I get olive oil at another store, which has it in glass without charging an arm and a leg. And it’s also the only one with paper egg cartons.

And who really needs little plastic-wrapped packages of cooked cut chicken? The convenience costs too much and saves little time. Cook your own chicken and cut it yourself. Freeze it. When you eat it all, freeze the next batch in the same bag.

Ignore precut produce—except maybe the salad bar––and peeled boiled eggs. It’s easy enough for anyone without a condition like arthritis to cut a pineapple at home right before serving it. Also, ignore zucchini and other veggies in foam trays wrapped in plastic film. Stores will be more likely to discontinue packaging practices if enough of us stop buying first.

Sources:

Grocery stores are packed with plastic–some are changing / Alejandra Borunda, National Geographic. April 22, 2019
The problems with Amsterdam’s plastic-free grocery aisle / Katherine Martinko, Treehugger. April 21, 2018 https://www.treehugger.com/plastic/problems-amsterdams-plastic-free-grocery-aisle.html
The rise of “zero-waste” grocery stores / Emily Matchar, Smithsonian. February 15, 2019 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/rise-zero-waste-grocery-stores-180971495/
Wegmans pledges to reduce in-store plastic packaging by 2 million pounds in 2019 / Susan Petroni, Framingham Source. April 22, 2019 https://framinghamsource.com/index.php/2019/04/22/wegmans-pledges-to-reduce-in-store-plastic-packaging-by-2-million-pounds-in-2019/

Photo credits:
Plastic on a riverbank. Some rights reserved by Horia Varlan
Taking home the groceries. Some rights reserved by Phillip Stewart
Packaged pre-cut fruit. Source unknown
Bioplastic packaging blister. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4465677
Bulk foods. Some rights reserved by Anna
Grocery cart. Pixabay