- cross-posted to:
- zerowaste@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- zerowaste@lemmy.ml
The federal government is calling for input from grocers, food and beverage producers, provincial governments and the general population.
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Wish they would go after companies that produce millions upon millions of tonnes of plastic bullshit. I’m not sorry if you created some widget, gadget, toy and it’s soul purpose is to be an injection molded happy meal 5 minute amusement piece. Capitalism… blah blah yeah yeah I know. A shift needs to happen.
While the plastic gadgets are wasteful, they don’t hold a candle to all the unnecessary food packaging that’s used. Just tear apart one of your garbage bags, and see how much is food-related packaging and how much is gadgets.
I visited the US (WV) recently, and I was appalled by how much waste goes unrecycled. At home (Europe) our family produces one bag of unrecycled waste every 2 weeks, in WV we produced 6 bags in 2 weeks, and that’s while living in European style (refillable water bottles, declining plastic bags for groceries, buying unpackaged produce, etc.).
Nearly every food item on the shelf has plastic. Aluminum cans are lined with plastic on the inside, glass bottles have a plastic freshness seal/cap. Even pasta boxes, one of the few cardboard packaged goods that don’t have an inner plastic liner often have a little plastic window so you can see what the pasta looks like.
And yet we’re being told that plastic bags are the problem. Literally the only plastic thing you get from the grocery store that isn’t single use. Instead we have paper bags which are bulkier and have a higher carbon footprint, and we still end up with a bunch of actually single use plastic bags because we no longer have anything to use as small garbage bags.
The carbon foot print is debatable, but plastic in the environment is basically there forever, where a paper bag breaks down relatively quickly and natural processes can deal with cellulose.
I’d moved into a house and noticed a plastic bag stuck on a branch high up on a tree. When I moved 11 years later, the bag was still there, showing essentially no signs of deterioration, even after 11+ years of exposure to sunlight and seasons that vary from -35C to +35C.
Paper bags can be used as garbage bags as long as the garbage isn’t soup. Mum did it back in the 1960s and 1970s until plastic bags replaced the traditional paper bag. We’re both back to using paper bags for garbage.
The last plastic bags that my grocery store used were so thin that they almost always had holes in them and leaked, so there weren’t appreciably better in that respect than paper.
I’m old enough to remember that grocery store only had paper bags, and replaced them with plastic bags because we were using too much paper and it was killing all the trees.
Now we’re back to paper bags…
That was a lie. I worked in groceries back in the 90s and the store owner said that the paper sacks cost him 5 cents and the plastic bags were less than 1 cent each… So stop handing out paper unless people ask for it!
