Looking at my local supermarket has become a more painful experience with how much our materialist lifestyle is started with the most basic human requirements. Walking through the isles I was trying to find a single item that wasn’t surrounded by or packed in single use packaging. The only example or recycling was the beer bottles managed by the national return scheme. Everything else was wrapped and packed in beautiful packaging, and then a further internal layer of plastic holding the content, that within the next week will reside briefly in a burning facility, or find its way to a rubbish tip or the bottom of the ocean for the next 1000 years. It is really disgusting how we have become normalised to accepting this wasteful lifestyle.
I did find a few examples of quick degrading paper packing for fruit or a milk box that was more environmentally considered. In a shop of maybe 5000 items, this was sad fact of reality. The supermarket is an example of the quick independent lifestyle where people do not have the time to visit the smaller shops for fresh or individual items that either do not need to be wrapped in such an amount of waste product.
I would like to research this further.
– How many items does a supermarket sell in a day.
– How many supermarkets are there
– How much packaging are they producing each day as a result
– How long all the waste they produce will take to decompose
– How bad the production of these waste products are to the environment