It’s great to see a growing awareness  around single-use plastic and its negative impact on the planet.  Restaurants and coffee shops have stopped automatically putting  plastic straws in drinks. Many shoppers now carry their own reusable shopping bags. These efforts will help reduce the 20 million tons of plastic litter entering the oceans each year.

Unfortunately, just as we’re becoming wise to straws and grocery bags, in large grocery stores it’s now  almost impossible to buy produce (and may other food items, like cookies, or nuts) without the plastic clam shell container. All that plastic that never goes away.  We may throw it in our blue bins, but where does it go from there? Could there possibly be a market for all that plastic? (And do we really need our cucumbers wrapped in plastic?) 

As a consumer I try to limit my purchase of items that are packaged in single-use plastic containers, but it’s a challenge. Farmer’s markets are mostly seasonal, but they’re  a good place to start, as are local produce stores.

Many environmentally responsible restaurants offer take-out food in compostable/paper containers, rather than plastic or styrofoam.  Would these not work for other food items? I understand that they’re not clear, you can’t see what you’re purchasing. But how did we purchase all those food items before the clam shell container? Maybe that’s the ‘two steps back’ that we need to be taking.