Retailers pick up plastic-bag baton
While consumers are being asked to make major changes to eradicate plastic from the system, retailers and manufacturers say they too are being proactive.
Single-use bags will be banned from mid-next year but there are many other plastics in the form of packaging, disposable cutlery, and food wrappings to go.
For its part, Foodstuffs, one of the country’s two supermarket giants, says its customers have made it very clear that sustainability doesn’t end with plastic bags.
‘‘Now that checkout bags have been addressed, there is a focus on reducing plastic packaging and waste,’’ Foodstuffs spokeswoman Antoinette Laird said.
Countdown said it was also looking to reduce and remove plastic where possible.
‘‘Over the past year we have removed 70 tonnes of unnecessary packaging from our produce section, including removing plastic packaging from bananas – this alone removed 15.8 tonnes of plastic,’’ a spokeswoman said.
‘‘We also no longer sell packs of singleuse plastic straws.’’
Like Countdown, Foodstuffs, which operates the Pak’n Save, Four Square and New World chains, supported the soft plastics recycling scheme and discouraged printed receipts. It also has shifted to recyclable meat trays, diverting about 120 million trays from landfill.
But Laird said one of its most exciting initiatives was Project Naked – also known as ‘‘food in the nude’’. Several New World stores in the South Island were misting unpackaged produce to cut down on packaging for freshness.
It was expensive, so the system was being introduced to new stores or during refurbishments, she said.
New World was trialling the concept of ‘‘bring your own’’ containers. Trials of paper alternatives to foil seafood bags, and of fibre-based deli trays, are also under way.
Where plastic is needed, Foodstuffs is aiming to only use clear grade 1 and 2 plastics, which can be recycled at the kerbside.
Food wastage was also being addressed and Foodstuffs had given away the equivalent of 5.6 million meals to local communities in the past 12 months, Laird said. ‘‘That’s food that’s too good to throw out, but not good enough to sell.’’
Manufacturers are also getting smarter. In Auckland, Innocent Packaging makes compostable coffee cups, clear containers and other serveware made of cornstarch, bamboo, sugar cane, paper and PLA, polyactic acid.
It even sells a toilet paper made of sugar cane and bamboo waste.
Everything is compostable and, in ideal conditions, returns to the earth in 10 to 12 weeks.
Although Innocent Packaging works with a collecting company and a composting company, general manager Fraser Hanson said the products would break down in a home compost pile or landfill – it just couldn’t guarantee how long it would take.
Hanson said there was some confusion about compostable items. They had been included in the plastic bag ban largely because there were no commercial recycling facilities at present and there was concern that they would contaminate the recycling waste stream.
‘‘The main thing with our packaging is that oil-based packaging or plastic packaging, even if it’s recycled, it’s still going to be recycled into another piece of plastic which won’t ever go away – whereas our products at least have the option to be composted.’’
Where plastics can’t be recycled or reduced, they are sometimes being removed. Foodstuffs has taken plasticstemmed cotton buds off the shelves, and the company was also working on alternatives to plastic straws.