Some of the discussion at my last post, about living without plastic, sparked a memory in me of an article read long ago. Well, I did some searching and found it — and I’d like to share it here with you all.
About two and a half years ago, telling people that he was fed up with overpackaging, Britain’s then-environment minister, Ben Bradshaw, told them to do something about it:
You should remove the offending packaging – and dump it at the checkout.
Shoppers were urged yesterday to take direct action to force supermarkets to cut the excessive and wasteful packaging that goes direct from the shop shelf to the household bin …. leave excessive wrapping at the tills and to report the stores to trading standards in an attempt to cut the amount of unnecessary plastic sent to landfill sites.
He said shoppers were “bombarded” with excessive food wrappers and warned that he would consider new laws to force shops to cut back on waste if they had not voluntarily made reductions by 2010.
Interestingly, that article also notes that Britain has fines in place for stores that are guilty of overpackaging — up to £5,000! And they’ve been used at least once.
However, newspaper The Guardian sent a few writers to grocery stores to test out the new “leave your plastic at the till” strategy, and found that it didn’t work as well as hoped:
Once I have paid, I slip the cardboard wrapping off the hummus and the ready-cooked rice. The woman at the till asks again if I’m sure I wouldn’t like a bag. I politely decline and get to work on unwrapping my ludicrously overpackaged herbs.
At this point a woman in an orange body warmer glides over and asks me if I could “not do that here please”. “I’m just taking the packaging off,” I reply, in my best Pollyanna voice.
“Can you not do that please,” she says again, this time a little forcefully.
“I won’t be a minute,” I say, hopefully.
I hear the tutting from the people in the queue. “If you don’t stop I’m going to have to get the manager,” says the woman in the body warmer. “I’m just taking the packaging off, like the environment minister told us to,” I reply. “I don’t care, I’ve got a big queue, I’m getting the manager,” says the woman. The people queuing are now shuffling from one foot to the other and rolling their eyes at each other, united in their disdain for the mad woman in front.
That was then, this is now: The Guardian reported earlier this month that the Tesco chain of stores was conducting a six-month trial, along the lines of a program in Germany, that will encourage customers to leave their plastic packaging at the till, where it will be recycled. Tesco is aiming to divert 95% of its trash to recycling by the end of the year.
Grant Hamilton
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