To want zero waste/ less package food stores to catch on?

[Bambambini]

I just find the amount of waste we all produce really depressing. Or I did when I was much younger and idealistic. I think now I've just more or less accepted we are selfish, wasteful and doomed and ruining the planet and have been sticking my head more or less in the sand these last years. The amount of plastic shit is just too depressing and where do you even start to deal with it.

That folk are reusing their own bags a lot now is a slight step forward. When I go to the supermarket I try and buy stuff with less packaging but it's hard to escape. Just been reading on these zero waste shops that are popping up. Wish there was one near where I live.

So AIBU to think this is a step in the right direction and we should encourage these stores - would you use them?

I've long wanted to campaign for a week where everyone who shops in a supermarket leaves all their packaging their, to try to get the supermarkets to reduce packaaging

A lot of packaging is bad. But some is good from a food waste prevention angle. Wasted food is a much bigger problem in terms of carbon than the packaging it comes in. At the moment, most people still buy too much food and waste it. Roughly a third. Shrink wrap on cucumbers (for example) prolongs their storage life very considerably.
The Wrap love food hate waste website has a lot of really good info on food & packaging.

That said, I would love to be near an unpackaged shop personally.

The problem with less packaging though is that food is more likely to get wasted (the packaging helps preserve it apparently) and that is very bad for the environment too. I went to a talk by the "Love Food Hate Waste" campaign and they seemed to think that packaging was the lesser of the two evils.

I think there may be a good future for packaging technologists who can design more robust packaging at the bulk level, rather than at the individual level, that will preserve the integrity of the product without all these horrid individual polystyrene trays, plastic/cellophane wrappers that make the fruit and vegetables all sweaty.

Mediterranean countries seem to do a lot more open markets, with all the produce in wooden trays, then people put it straight into rope and hessian bags. Recently in US I couldn't believe how over-packaged everything was. Supermarkets have a vested interest to make things to look attractive on the shelves.

I I've started buying most of my fruit and veg from our local market - this is easy as its near my work, and open every day so its not out of my way at all. they pack everything up in a box for you after you pay.

if you take the box back the next time they give you a couple of pounds off your shop. you know, for the environment.

we keep a lot of out "stuff" in the kitchen in glass jars. so things like pasta coming in bags just get decanted into the jars then the bags go in the bin.

I'd love to be near an unpackaged shop. would def give it a try

I think that an "unpackaged shop" would be a good idea if the people who use are also careful not to waste food. In reality though, I bet a lot of people will use the shops to make themselves feel worthy but the result will be that they waste more food than people using ordinary supermarkets and consequently the shops will have a negative impact on the environment rather than a positive one.

There used to be a shop like this years ago in the town center where I live in Reading.

My Dad used to always use it,no idea why it went it was always really popular.They had massive metal tins filled with things like different types of flour,sugar,tea bags,bread mix,roll mix.

We always try to recycle as much as we can,yet we still manage to overfill a large bin every 2 weeks,there is 7 of us though and we have 9 pets.

Myself and my DH were awful for remembering to bring our own bags when we go shopping so my DH keeps them in the boot of the car now so we don't forget them.

I really want to try making a wormery and I really need to get a water butt,we have tons of flowers and plants in our gardens so really should be using one.

Markets are usually really good when it comes to recycling,our local one they all use paper bags for the fruit and veg instead of plastic like the supermarkets.

What annoys me the most is the plastic which is non recyclable. Why not just package in recyclable s

Much meat and veg is packaged with nitrogen gas to help the food last longer.
Supermarkets provide things this way because most people prefer it - they do not drive our behaviour, we drive them.

The point about food wastage is a good one. I'm quite guilty of that. I guess the whole food/buying system we are used to needs a lot of rethinking. We have so much food and crap generally in our cupboards and fridges. The choice and easy and cheap availability of food has made many of us sloppy. I need to completely think more about my buying habits.

Ideally, I'd like to buy more local and unpackaged food. But buy what we need and will use and not waste it. Get back to more simple eating habits.

Years ago I had friends from Germany. They were heavy into recycling and any food they wasted - they used to put the cost of that food to charity so made themselves pay double for any food they threw away.

Bambambini A lot of the issue is time - with most couples both working, a weekly shop is simpler than multiple shops and carrying that home requires a car and parking.

I remember shopping with my mum when I was young as fruit and veg was always wrapped in paper bags at the greengrocers. Can't remember what the butcher put joints of meat in, but sliced cold meat always went in paper bags and bread from the bakers was always wrapped in thin paper. Why is it so difficult to do this now? And let's not forget that fish and chips always came in newspaper.

I am pretty good at recycling plastics - but in our area, we can't recycle black plastic. It is surprising how much food is sold in black plastic containers so it has to go to landfill here.

Supermarket checkout operators are obsessed with giving people plastic bags unecessarily (except the likes of Lidl and Aldi where you have to pay). Yesterday, I bought one item in Tesco. It was in a box. The checkout lad asked me if I wanted a bag. I said "no thanks". It was an out of town store where most people will have come in their cars which are a few metres from the front door of the store. Why do they need to put a box in a bag?

I'm another mushroom bag rebel. Another reason why I love self scan, weigh it and straight in the bag.

Coloured plastics are a nightmare as they contaminate the waste stream and its nigh on impossible to get the colour out once it's in. I think it's the US where they commonly have those big red detergent containers which can't be recycled simply because somebody, somewhere decided to make them red.

Do you want to know one of the big culprits though? The humble toothbrush. Has more different materials than you'd expect and they're almost impossible to seperate. There's a beach in the pacific just covered in.plastic toothbrushes.

'The great recovery' is a really good initiative to get designers to think about this kind of stuff.

Seems like the supermarkets have quite a bit of low hanging fruit though.

I like lots of choice so I don't relish your 'pared down' thing OP. But I also like the choice of buying things loose, that you often can't do in supermarkets.

I'm lucky to have a small market within two minutes' walk and that cuts waste. I have a bag or two and they give me stuff. Often I'll say I'll tip it in my own bag without even their own wrapping - obviously that doesn't go for meat or fish.

It's not particularly cheap but it's not wildly expensive either. The choice is great - meat, fish and vegetables - but that's only because enough people here spend enough money to make it worth the traders' while. I guess the pitches are expensive. Not Borough Market rates, but quite high.

I get all my vegetables there and all my fish except for canned tuna or smoked mackerel. I buy special meat - not the same as The League of Gentlemen's special stuff - just cuts like T-bone, rib eye steaks, Barnsley chops, lamb cutlets, fresh rabbits. All their meat is superior to Sainsbury's but the price is really high. I don't blame the butcher but I want to be careful.

His lamb cutlets are things of wonder btw. They are cut from the bodies of enchanted creatures. But they are so expensive and so tiny that I can only justify them a few times.

There's just one individual Italian deli now - there used to be three - and a dedicated cheese shop where you can ask for the exact bit to be cut and buy it with minimal packaging. They aren't cheap though. But it works out relatively cheaper and less wasteful to do what I did yesterday and buy three slices of bresaola and two slices each of whichever three salamis he chose.

I combined it for lunch with some leftover salad leaves, pickles and mashed Italian-style sausages that I found reduced from £2.80 for six to 50p. Fifty pence for six premium sausages??? I only used one and mashed it up with some cheese on some bake-your-own ciabatta from Iceland.

Sorry if I'm coming over as a food ponce, OP

What I think I'm trying to say that it's not that easy to shop around in terms of price, time, access or food or packaging waste.

I also agree with the poster who said that supermarkets sometimes need packaging to reduce waste and pickiness. People are horribly wasteful and trashy.

A lot of packaging is to do with safety and sometimes required by Food standards legislation or at least by teh supermarkets buying it.Nobody wants food poisoning/contamination cases on their hands.

It isn't just the packaging left on when they are on the shelves - most pallets are coated in several layers of film to get them to the warehouses

You think boxes should just be left to fall off the pallets onto the poor feckers who work in the warehouses?

I've just read that back and I sound fucking insufferable.

If I met me I'd want to kill me.

Sorry.

You think boxes should just be left to fall off the pallets onto the poor feckers who work in the warehouses?

Agree amybear2 and also the point about packaging sometimes being a required food standard. Who hasn't been in a supermarket and seen people damage stuff or leave chilled items wherever they fancy just because they don't fancy it any more?

Every fruit and veg stall I've ever seen has prominent signs up telling people not to touch.

I've posted this on here before but there is a local woman who, after paying for her shopping decants everything she can into storage containers and Tupperware boxes.
She then leaves the packaging for the supermarket to dispose of. Her theory is that if the rubbish disposal is their problem they will find a way to reduce it.

YANBU.
I'd love supermarkets etc. to use less packaging. I love the idea of leaving my packaging at the supermarket. Might try that.

I used to love those market stalls with big bins of dried goods like flour, muesli, nuts & raisins which you could buy by weight, shovelling them into bags. I guess you could bring your own Tupperware to put them straight into. Reminds me of student days shopping in Leeds covered market.

Theres a happy medium though which I dont always think the supermarkets get right, so the shrink wrap around a cucumber is fine, but sometimes they then have a pastic bag sealed around that, and occasionally I've see it shrink wrapped, on a tray in a bag. Well if most supermarkets can get away with just shrink wrapping it, then the rest is superfluous surely?

I remember shopping at kwiksave as a child, they had the fruit and veg section off to one side behimd a counter, with all the produce out with no packaging and you got served, like at the meat counter. So you could see what was on offer and ask for how much you wanted. This meant that the fruit and veg didnt get mauled by the public and packaging was reduced, I miss that

Agreed. I know the cashiers are only trying to help but they quite often will put loose fruit/veg I've PURPOSELY not put in a bag, in a bag. Or they'll put something like a birthday card in a plastic bag . I don't use the plastic bags for my fruit and vegetables at all, I try and balance them on top of other things in the trolley so they don't actually touch the trolley. I never buy bananas in the bags, they're a rip off. I'll buy loose as much as possible tbh. I like going to fruit and veg markets as well, they use paper bags and biodegradable carrier bags.

I remember paper bags at the greengrocers too. The potatoes were always still covered in soil so they would be tipped straight into the shopping bag from the weighing scales and then the other items would go on top inside the brown bags. They'd be swung round so that they were twisted shut at the top and everything stayed in, surprisingly effective and no machinery needed. I dread to think how many resources go into shrink wrapping an apple!