Fruit and vegetables already come in their own natural wrapping – their skins!
Embrace the nude vegetable!
All too often we get home from a weekly grocery shop and spend ages unwrapping and removing plastic packaging and stickers from the fruit and vegetables. Not only is this inconvenient, but it’s also pretty bad for our environment and planet.
Fruit and vegetables already come in their own natural wrapping – their skins. They don’t usually need to be packaged in plastic and you can save yourself time and money, and reduce your plastic waste, just by embracing the nude vegetable.
Why is this important?
We have a major, major plastic problem – plastic is filling our landfills, choking the oceans, polluting our atmosphere and contaminating our food. According to Plastic Oceans, 10 million tons of plastic are dumped into oceans every year.
That’s more than a truckload of plastic rubbish every single minute of every single day!
Most of this plastic is ‘single use’ – the plastic packaging on fruit and vegetables in our supermarkets is a good example of this. This means it is used once and then discarded into landfill or incinerators or oceans where it continues to pollute and impact ecosystems.
A simple alternative
Here are a few simple ways to avoid plastic packaging on your fruit and vegetables:
- Purchase loose produce and use your own fabric / reusable bag for convenience during shopping and at the check out
- Purchase whole items – when fruit and veg is pre-cut they then need to be packaged for hygiene and protection
- Where you must purchase packaged items look for those packaged in compostable packaging
- Look for the recyclable symbol too, and make sure to recycle these packaging items when you’re finished with them
- Buy local and in season produce, this is less likely to need packaging (and lowers your food miles too!)
- Buy from independent grocers or farmers markets
- Sign up for a fruit / vegetable box subscription (cardboard, of course!)
Please take action
On your next shopping trip, please consider the following actions:
- swap your plastic wrapped fruit and vegetable purchases for those that are sold individually and without plastic
- look for items without stickers
- take your own fabric or mesh bags
- talk to your local shops about the amount of plastic they are using
- make a complaint to your supermarket chain about plastic packaging
If you haven’t already, please also sign up for our fortnightly bulletin ‘Take Action’ using the form below; thank you for your support.