She tried to avoid plastic while grocery shopping for a week. Here's how it went

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Gilberto de Piento
Posts: 1942
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2013 10:23 pm

She tried to avoid plastic while grocery shopping for a week. Here's how it went

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Short article about trying to avoid buying plastic while grocery shopping: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... ow-it-went
I didn't see the thin plastic thread running between one leaf on my pineapple and its tag when I put the pineapple in my shopping cart, when I checked out or when I unpacked groceries at home. It wasn't until I chopped off the top and tug on the tag that it hit me.

I'd broken the rules again.

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C40
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Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2011 4:30 am

Re: She tried to avoid plastic while grocery shopping for a week. Here's how it went

Post by C40 »

Can't go to a store like that and avoid plastic. Need to go to more traditional sales places: markets, butchers, farms, etc. Any buy food that was grown nearby!!! Not pineapples and chocolate from many thousand miles away

More like this: https://travel.home.sndimg.com/content/ ... 90263.jpeg

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Slevin
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Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2015 7:44 pm
Location: Sonoma County

Re: She tried to avoid plastic while grocery shopping for a week. Here's how it went

Post by Slevin »

I do this nearly every week. It’s not too tough when you figure a system out and live in a decently large city to support the infrastructure, but you don’t buy things from conventional stores anymore really (other than produce), and you end up with asking a lot of farmers at the farmers market if you can use your bags instead of theirs.

I’m a bit spoiled though, in that I have a large bulk store near me, and a fledgling zero waste food store as well https://nudefoodsmarket.com/. The most annoying part of eating this way is that I often pay 1.5x - 2x the price of a good to avoid plastic. Not joking. Though I do end up eating higher quality, organic everything, which I don’t really care about that much for oats or sunflower seeds, etc. And that price inflation is making the farmers markets a bit absurd (coming from someone who is even used to paying VHCOL farmers market prices).

7Wannabe5
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Re: She tried to avoid plastic while grocery shopping for a week. Here's how it went

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In Smil's new book "How Everything Really Works", he notes that the modern economy/infrastructure is largely based on concrete, ammonia, plastic, and steel, all of which are very fossil fuel dependent. All of our technological advances at the margin won't herald a new era for archeologists of the future digging through our rubble until/unless we move beyond concrete, ammonia, plastic, and steel. All of the new cities in China were built from massive amounts of these four materials and all the new cities in Africa will be built with massive amounts of these materials. Unless...?

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