Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses...
Matthew 6
The CBC television program Marketplace did an excellent, unsettling piece on the plastics which are now omnipresent in our Canadian grocery stores. They set a challenge to two couples, one to make choices not to buy products wrapped in plastic and the other to abandon their virtuous, low-plastic ways. They visited a supermarket in Britain which has informed suppliers that they will now source products from companies which reduce or eliminate plastic packaging -- or else. It has been remarkably successful -- in 10 weeks, the store eliminated the use of plastic packaging for nearly 2,000 products --and business has increased.
Marketplace polled customers as they left grocery stores and overwhelmingly they wanted less plastic in their shopping carts. Yet inquiries to Loblaw and Sobeys about reducing plastic were met with either silence or, well, corporate bafflegab.
It just seems to be getting worse, rather than better. Eggs in plastic containers, and fruit of every description, meat with trays which can't be recycled. And even if we do "recycle" our plastics we're discovering that shiploads of the stuff are being sent to countries such as Malaysia where it is illegally dumped. God knows we can do better, and while we already attempt to reduce plastic waste in our household, I realize I better step up my game. The blue bin for plastic just has too much in it being kicked to the curb each week. We all need to tell those who sell us our daily bread and just about everything else in our lives that plastic doesn't make sense.
https://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/episodes/2018-2019/plastic-waste-the-supermarket-challenge
Canadian plastic in Malaysia
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