Canada sets sights on next plastic waste target: food packaging
Canada sets sights on next plastic waste target: food packaging
The federal government is calling for input from grocers, food and beverage producers, provincial governments and the general population.
The federal government is calling for input from grocers, food and beverage producers, provincial governments and the general population.
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.
53While 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.).
38Nearly 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.
18Definitely a good idea to reduce plastic waste, but I think that putting too much emphasis on grocery packaging can miss the mark. For things like food, it is important to be able to have things sealed for freshness or food safety. The unnecessary waste in my mind comes more from things like packaging of other products, like showy retail clamshell packaging that’s significantly larger than the item being sold, or that only exists as a marketing gimmick to make things look good on retail shelves.
A good model is some things from Amazon that just gets shipped in plain cardboard because that’s more recyclable/renewable than plastic. I also feel that the efficiency of having large warehouses, even when the items are shipped individually is better than having to have a whole retail supply chain that involves creating an appealing retail space. Especially if someone is making a trip in a vehicle to pick up just a couple retail items. Another good example is something like the Lee Valley model where many items don’t have significant packaging at all, and they use a smaller show-room style retail space supplemented by more efficient warehousing storage in the back. Lee Valley even has a program to collect and re-use shipping boxes so they can be directly used multiple time before getting put through a recycling process.
In a lot of ways, it’s up to the consumer to make buying choices based on the sustainable practices of the business they choose to frequent. Just blaming the business for the waste created by the service that their customers choose to use is just kicking the can down the road. If we chose to shop at businesses with sustainable practices or buy products with more sustainable packaging it would create a clear financial incentive for other businesses to follow suit.
4on the sunshine coast, we introduced composting service. my family of three produces about one large bag every 2 weeks (plus extras due to ongoing renos). it made a huge difference!
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Yes please. Once you take composting and recycling seriously you realize that your garbage can only contains those stupid styrofoam packagings
36Reject modernity, go back to butcher paper!
29The sheer amount of plastic waste created before it reaches the customer is far worse... Tons of shrink wrap and Styrofoam filling the garbage bins of every store and we're worried about the little plastic window in your box of pasta. This is just straws and shopping bags again and again; no meaningful change and even worse is that it makes people think something's being done so they don't look too deep.
23Can we stop complaining about progress?
Yes, you're right, there are bigger issues. Doesn't mean we can't celebrate the small victories. Any and all waste reduction is a good thing.
25I think what they're worried about is sort of like giving a hypothermic person hard alcohol to "warm" them up. It masks the real problem and can result in real harm. If we get caught up in these small victories , which I agree are good, we may lose sight of some of the heavy lifting we need to do to make real change. Many corporations rely on misdirection and topic fatigue to keep from having to do anything of real substance.
9I agree with you but I also think the large companies seem to always get away with this and it's the consumers that have to do all the work.
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How much per unit though? Like if a skid with a thousand boxes of doodads is super-shrinkwrapped, yes when you cut off the wrap it's a lot but how much wrap per doodad?
5It of course depends on the product. Clothing tends to be individually wrapped for example. Some foods are actually not too bad because they come in a big box or crate. Manufacturing creates a good bit. Some places use way more plastic than they ever used to; look at how silage bales are done these days. There's also the tons of stuff thrown away by stores instead of being discounted or donated; it's of items that are returned just go straight to the bin, never mind seasonal items that are just disposed of.
My point is we keep putting the target on the little things that are more visible, the danger being that this makes the public perception of the progress made inaccurate and is sort of a "green washing" diversion.
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Extended producer responsibility FTW.
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Good. If you go through my landfill garbage, food packaging plastic is basically everything in there (I have compost pickup where I live). Most of it is highly unnecessary.
It's dumb we use our ultra-permanent wonder material for our most temporary items. It's only a thing because we effectively subsidise the waste disposal.
19Wait. You mean to tell me that a plastic bag of milk, bagged with other plastic bags of milk, bagged in yet another plastic bag at checkout isn't a good idea?
11Just wait till you see how all this stuff is shipped to the grocery store. In a box with a plastic bag inside, on a palette wrapped in plastic,
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Remember when the pre-grated Parm cheese came in the paper cylinder with a paper top with a metal spout? Like salt still is sometimes?
Remember when coffee beans came in paper bags and things like Oreos or keebler cookies came in corrogated paper sleeves with printed paper overwraps? Remember bread in paper bags? Why does gum now come in blow-molded cups?
You can't even find rolls of wax paper anymore! It's not the .1 mil wrap on ground meat that's the real problem.
Taxes and regulations on the petrochemical companies are at all time lows and that lets the rest of these grocery companies get greedy and penny pinch their way to stockholder satisfaction and quarterly bonuses.
You can complain about consumer-end plastic all you want but it won't stop until you cut it off at the source. When you hear, "Drill baby drill!" they're not doing it for just your car (which incedently is also a huge source of plastic waste.) Hydrocarbon conglomerates are the source of all this nonsense.
But what are you going to do? 1. Be nice to your neighbors and Walk or ride your bike or 2. persecute minorities and immigrants and buy huge new SUVs every other year like the Tv tells you to?
8Those trays in the photo. Are they still used in Canada? They've been gone for years in the UK.
8Yup, they're ubiquitous around here.
9Some styrofoam, some blow-molded plastic trays.
And the juice absorbing liner is always plastic, too.
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3Yet more environmental performance art that doesn't have a significant impact on actual waste. I wonder when the backlash will start, potentially putting us in a worse state than where we started? I'm plenty pro-environment, but my city just forced all the restaurants to charge 15 cents for each paper bag they put food in when you go through a drive through and I can easily see something like that getting on peoples' nerves. I bought a small portable cooler to keep in the car so I don't have to pay that fee and the amount of plastic that went into it is huge, so it's already a counterproductive rule from a practical sense.
-5Hot take: when an F-350 idles in a Wendy's drive through for 5-10 minutes to get a burger, fries and drink all in their own container, the recyclable/compostable paper bag to hold it all together probably isn't the problem. But that's just a guess.
14Then go after both problems?
Big cities in Canada should also charge inefficient vehicles operating within urban centers (downtown Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal). In other places, this is enforced by license plate registration and discourages the operation of inefficient vehicles within downtown urban areas.
6Indeed. And just because I was feeling snarky and annoyed about the 15 cent charge, I asked for extra napkins one time and they gave me enough extra paper napkins to easily have made a paper bag out of. The burger comes in its own cardboard box. The fries have their own cardboard box. It's such a silly and pointless thing that's clearly just being done so that they can say they're "doing something."
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