It’s interesting how this conversation has quickly moved onto reducing plastic packaging when the content is about food waste. It was the same in the comments section on Instagram. Although not totally opposed I think plastic packaging in general reduces food waste, as the article Hunzas has shared says:
Research undertaken by the Co-op showed that the end-to-end shelf life of a cucumber (from picking to disposal by the consumer) when not wrapped in plastic was reduced by 30% when compared with one wrapped in plastic.
When you look at the solutions that will have the most impact in keeping global temperatures to 1.5 degrees increase, recycling or reducing reliance on oil-based plastics are very low down the list, but reducing food waste is right up there.
Food waste = 94.56 Gigatons CO2 Equivalent Reduced / Sequestered
Recycling = 6.02 Gigatons CO2 "
Bioplastics = 3.80 Gigatons CO2 "
While I don’t for a moment think that this gives licence to use as much plastic as anyone wants (and at Huel you know we’re working really hard on a truly recyclable pouch and have increased our use of recycled plastic in our RTD to 51%), but I do think that given a choice between reducing plastic waste, or reducing food waste I would choose reducing food waste every time.
Surely given that we know 1/3 of all food is wasted which is leading to 3.3 billion tons of CO2 emissions each year, we need to work out ways where we can reduce that waste in the supermarkets (as well as at home, in the field and during transportation)?