Reducing and Recycling Plastics at the Grocery Store
The U.S. pitches 42 million metric tons of plastic waste each year, and most ends up in oceans or landfills, where it takes up to 500 years to break down.
Grocery shopping is a primary source of the plastic that ends up as waste. “Supermarkets are where the average consumer encounters the most throwaway plastics,” said John Hocevar, a marine biologist and oceans campaign director for Greenpeace USA, in a March 2021 report by FoodPrint.org.
Your weekly grocery shopping trip is a golden opportunity to begin Pitching Plastics. In this month’s edition of Pitching Plastics, we’ll show you how to reduce the amount of plastic you get in grocery stores AND tell you about a recycling opportunity you may not know about!
Reduce Your Grocery Plastics
First, make a list before you shop. Doing so means you won’t have to go back for something you forgot, and it’ll help curb impulse buys of plastic-heavy products.
Second, take your reusable bags with you! Keep them by the door, in your car, or folded in your handbag or backpack so that they’re always at the ready.
While at the store, try buying as much fresh food as you can, and when you buy packaged food, look for things in reusable containers. For things you do have to buy in plastic, aim to buy in bulk instead of buying individually wrapped items. Skip the prepackaged cheeses and head to the deli counter for cheese wrapped in paper. Ask the butcher for meat wrapped in paper instead of strapped to a Styrofoam® tray, since Styrofoam® is impossible to recycle! Choose eggs in paper cartons and single-use cutlery made from paper.
Recycling Plastic at the Grocery Store
Now, here is that added recycling opportunity. Did you know you can bring plastic film, which you can’t recycle at home, to a receptacle at your local grocery store? Collect Ziploc® bags, Amazon packaging, bubble wrap, and newspaper, bread, and dry cleaner bags inside your reusable bags, so you can drop off these plastics in the bin when you enter your usual grocery store!
RecycleByCity, a terrific guide for how to dispose of just about anything in Chicago, can tell you very specifically what plastics are accepted, and you can look up your zip code at PlasticFilmRecycling to find the drop-off store closest to you.
Lastly, streaming FREE only until November 30—the 2020 Emmy-winning documentary The Story of Plastic takes a stunning deep dive into how the plastics industry turns villages in Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere into dumping grounds for our trash, and how plastic manufacturing plants in Texas and Louisiana poison poor communities of color by pumping cancerous toxins (and greenhouse gases) into the air and water. Kids who live near the Houston Ship Channel are 56% more likely to develop leukemia than kids who live in the rest of the US!
To learn more about how oil corporations like Exxon make bank off plastic, and how towns in the Philippines are fighting back to make Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and other companies pay $$$ for the plastic they churn out, definitely take just eighty minutes to watch the movie.
Got any tips for reducing plastic? Interested in joining the LWV Chicago Environmental Action Committee? Contact Debby Halpern or Claudia Jackson!