This packaging takes the piss

[insanitypack]

I tweeted Waitrose and this was their response:

Hi Sam, reducing our impact on the environment is really important to us and we know it is to our customers too. We have committed to making all our own-label packaging widely recyclable, reusable, or home compostable by 2025.

Surely this product shouldn't have made it onto shelves in the first bloody place! Madness.

Truly this is not a thing @LostInShoebiz.

Emails can be turned off and plenty of posters wander off from threads they have posted on.

A cucumber already has a protective layer, it’s doesn't need more. Cucumbers lose moisture 20 times faster if they’re not wrapped so would go bendy and useless within a couple of days and be fit for nothing. Better to wrap them, keep them hygienic during transport and fresh enough to sell.

WRT the pot - yes it could go in a smaller pot, but I imagine these are existing pots already used for other products in the range. Aside from a branding continuity issue, there will be economies of scale at play here - having new pots created just for this one product would be a huge waste of hundreds of thousands of pounds and masses of energy in making new tooling etc.

Using an existing packaging product is actually the more environmentally responsible thing to do.

@SuburbanRhonda maybe have a nice and a relax for ten minutes!

Poor Rhonda - coming on here for a good old grump and everyone lays into her.

Ah thank you willow, but I work in family support in a primary school so I have a tough hide!

Thanks for the info about the black garlic.
Something folk her may know: why do recycled bin liners smell so revolting? anyone know?

I know I’m going to sound 900 years old but I wistfully remember the days when the fruit and veg in the supermarket was loose and you didn’t have to buy it in pre packed plastic .5/1kg bags.

I truly think it brings greater food waste as folk buy more than they need and it spoils plus plastic bags.

When I went to shops in Germany on hols as a little girl they all took their own individual string bags for veg - I completely think we could learn from them now.

Ps: I know it wouldn’t work for certain things like black garlic but it would for most fruit surely?

@SuburbanRhonda

I know I’m going to sound 900 years old but I wistfully remember the days when the fruit and veg in the supermarket was loose and you didn’t have to buy it in pre packed plastic .5/1kg bags.

If you go to the market or your local little turkish shop you still can buy it loose. I hoghly recommend it, but that's because I absolutely hate taking out the garbage. At one point I had a garbage bag full of packaging instead of rubbish.

I could recycle the inner packaging, the outer packaging, and a cucumber sleeve.
Then again I live in Holland where everything comes labelled with which recycling bin it needs to go into. Anything that can't be recycled is incinerated. If you buy a toaster, the shop expects you to hand over your old one for recycling. If you buy online the retailer will include instructions on how to reuse the packaging to return the old one.
The problem is as much the UK as the supermarkets.

I'm sure it was @SuburbanRhonda who started a thread in site stuff asking people not to @ her

Fuck off @sittingonacornflake

Is anyone else's thumbs just itching to @SuburbanRhonda or was that just me?

Recycling is not a goal, it's a fourth option after refuse, reduce and reuse have been exhausted.

@SuburbanRhonda

How's your inbox looking?

@BaronessBomburst

Unless that toaster has a 3 pin UK plug.

The guy in Machine Mart Den Haag looked at me like I’d handed him a grenade without the pin.

Waitrose is terrible for this! Since we started shopping there our waste increased so much!

I asked for that, didn’t I?

Waitrose is one of the worst shops for putting fruit in black polystyrene cradles... terrible wasteful packaging throughout the shop. I assume they think that people who shop there are too posh to GAF.

What an utter load of bollocks.

I shop in Waitrose. I don't buy the fruit in the polystyrene for exactly that reason.

Waitrose is one of the more ethical supermarkets, and funnily enough, actually seem to listen to their customers. They have committed to cutting packaging and have just got rid of cups for their tea and coffee.

Tell me how you think any of the other supermarkets are any better?

@PaulHollywoodsSexGut

I'm now getting toaster adverts from an online retailer in Belgium.

Asda is utterly dreadful for overpackaging a number of products. I can’t imagine anyone shopping there is too posh for anything, let alone giving a fuck about the environment. Ultimately, and sadly, consumers currently care more about the bottom line. If more packaging means the food they spend their hard earned money on isn’t bashed or wasted through oxidisation at the normal rate then that’s what they prefer. Supermarkets will only change when their customers tell them to or vote with their wallets. As someone has rightly said upthread, Waitrose are very proactive environmentally in general - don’t be mislead by this thread’s one example - because it’s custmers DGAF, posh or not.

Hey! I live to serve x

The outer pot is compketely unnecessary if the garlic is vacuum packed. It really is up to us to not buy this sort of thing; I'm sure you can get black garlic from, say, an independent deli or health food shop - I've seen it for sale in our little market!

*DoGAF obviously, for the Waitrose customers

In a parallel universe this thread evolved into direct action, where thousands of mumsnetters left excess packaging at supermarket tills resulting in pledges from the supermarkets to reduce packaging.

Here it just results in posters sniping at each other.

Yes but does your little market have thousands passing through every day almost totally unsupervised dropping and squeezing the item, probably not.