Grocery store compostables – All wrapped up in plastic

There is a certain irony to the produce section of my grocery store. I’ve noticed that the organic produce are more packaged than their conventional counterparts. Here, the purest of the produce are surrounded by plastic, not of the compostable kind.

Every week I ask myself: Organic bananas in plastic or conventional bananas without plastic? I’ve been favoring the naked conventional bananas, but if there was an option for plastic-less organic bananas I’d go for those. Each week I wonder, why are the organic bananas in plastic?

One of my theories is that packaging suggests to the consumer that the product is more valuable. Organic produce costs more than conventional produce. Perhaps the packaging helps consumers swallow the price.

I don’t see packaging as making a product more valuable. In fact, I see it as a liability and so does my municipality. Once it comes home with me I need to find a way to get it out of the house again, either by placing it in the trash or the recycle bin. Once I bring it to my municipal solid waste district, they need to either landfill it or recycle it. The latter isn’t always as easy as it may seem. So, I’ll take the plastic-free bananas.

I usually pass on plastic produce bags too for the same reason. Produce bags usually have a recycling symbol on them, but how many people have a place where they can actually take plastic bags for recycling? My grocery store accepts them, but my guess is that not everyone has that option so, of course, they end up in the landfill.

Now that my paper towel dream has come true, at least at one store, I’m dreaming about compostable produce bags. They exist, but they are more expensive than their conventional plastic counterparts, so you don’t see them much. Anyway, in my dreams all the grocery stores have them and everyone who takes them uses them to line their compost crock. Then they all get composted along with all those food scraps that everybody is composting (this is my dream, so everybody is composting everything that can be composted). The bags are an asset because they are useful after their original task of holding produce is finished. They are a convenient way to carry food scraps out to the composter and nobody has to wash slime out of the compost crock. Best of all, they rot, just like what they are designed to hold.

Tags: compostable bags, food packaging, organic, plastic, produce, produce bags

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 6:34 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.