If you love shopping in Coles and Woolies and eat a lot of their fresh produce, then chances are you’ve encountered this problem.
Both supermarkets are notorious for wrapping some of their fresh produce in plastic wrapping, and it’s drawn them plenty of criticism over the years.
Two years ago a petition was started on change.org calling for the supermarkets to stop wrapping the fresh produce in plastic, and today the battle is still ongoing.
The petition was relaunched three weeks ago, and in that time more than 60,000 people have signed – taking the total to 170,000 signatures in two years.
Pat Lowe and Alex Smee, who started the petition, delivered it to the big supermarkets two years ago.
But they decided to relaunch it because the plastic is still there.
“The two supermarket chains are left in no doubt that plastic wrap is unpopular with their customers,” they wrote.
“As most of you will know, both supermarkets have said they are investigating alternatives to plastic for their packaging, and both tell us that they are using ‘recyclable’ plastic.
“We believe they would do better to abandon unnecessary packaging altogether.
“Unfortunately, two years after this petition was delivered, we walk into their shops and still see shelves and shelves of herbs, vegetables and fruit wrapped in plastic.”
Lowe and Smee are calling on Australians to keep plastic wrapping on the agenda, and to boycott products wrapped in plastic.
“Keep saying NO to plastic!” the wrote.
“There are enough of us to force this change.”
You might be wondering what the supermarkets have to say for themselves?
Well, Coles responded to the initial petition by talking about its recycling initiatives.
“We are mindful of the need to minimise our waste and over the past five years we’ve been making good progress to improve our recycling rate which has increased to 70% this year,” they wrote.
“We are also helping our customers with their waste by providing recycling solutions. Hopefully, you’ve heard about our soft plastics recycling program with RED Group that’s now available in 480 Coles stores across Australia where customers can bring back their soft plastics – including bread bags, biscuit packs, plastic bags and polypropylene shopping bags – to be recycled and turned into useful things like outdoor furniture for schools and, most recently, trolley bays at one of our new stores.
“Approximately 280 tonnes of plastic was returned to our supermarkets by customers for recycling via this program in the past year. To encourage customers to bring even more plastic back to Coles for recycling, we’ve begun putting a recycling logo on relevant Coles brand products and we’re looking at expanding the program into more regional areas.”
The supermarket giant acknowledged that some of its customers preferred not to have organic produce wrapped in plastic.
“It’s something we’ll continue to review but we don’t have an easy solution for this right now,” Coles wrote.
“It is used for a number of reasons, including to allow differentiation between organic products and conventional products – so that our customers receive what they pay for and our organic farmers are rewarded for their effort and passion.”