I usually wax lyrical, as do many other zero waste bloggers, on the virtues of zero waste food shopping. Those photos of us, filling up our jars or bags with bulk binned food, is one of the more popular visual associations people have with the zero waste lifestyle. See below.
But when the curtain is pulled back on the store room of these bulk food shops, you would find there is no such thing as zero waste shopping.
Yes, zero waste shopping does not
exist! Hear me out, because I am going to talk about a solution
further down. Don't worry, I'm not going to suggest we all start growing everything from scratch in our backyards either.
Bulk food shopping allows the consumer
(you and me) to buy food without packaging. We go in, collect our
food, shampoo, cleaning products, honey, soy sauce etc from bulk
bins. It's usually purchased in jars, plastic containers and cloth
bags that are used each time we all shop. Bulk shopping is about the
reuse of packaging by the consumer.
It's also about freeing up the
responsibility of disposing the packaging. When I take my newly
filled jars and bags home, I don't have any packaging to throw away.
This type of shopping model is challenging the present supermarket
individually wrapped system and I applaud it. Bulk food shopping puts
the responsibility back onto the store where I bought it – it's up
to them to find a way to deal with the packaging.
When I shopped at the supermarket or
corner store, the food came individually packaged for us. Once I
emptied the package of food, we disposed of it in our rubbish bin or
recycling bins at the supermarket. I was making the rubbish and it
filled up the bin each week.
Zero Waste shopping does not exist,
because those bins of food we collect it from, is originally filled
with food that is packaged, just on a larger scale. Large plastic
sacks and tubs, that can not all be recycled or reused is what you
would find in the back room of a bulk food shop. If that packaging is
recycled, it would be down-cycled, meaning the plastic become another
item of plastic and thats it. Down-cycling is the end of the
road. Some items do come in paper, but not many. So while we the
consumer are not making rubbish, our bulk stores are and that is why
there is no such thing as zero waste shopping. It does not exist,
yet.
At my wedding, we hired TAP. Wines to
serve wine. We chose them because we loved their business model; to challenge the wastefulness of wine bottles in restaurants. In a nutshell,
TAP. have stainless steel kegs, filled up at wineries and then fitted into restaurant/cafe/bars, providing wine on tap. Rather than a new wine bottle, that comes with a cork
or metal lid, stickers, boxes etc, TAP. simply fill up a stainless
steel barrel, drop it off at the venue and replace it when needed.
The stainless steel barrels are cleaned between refills and will last
for over twenty years. At the end of their life, they can be recycled completely, not
down-cycled like plastic. One, 20 litre stainless steel keg, is the equivalent of 26 bottles of wine. That is a lot of resources saved.
The business model got me thinking
about bulk food stores. Could a third party company do the same, but for
bulk foods and make the zero waste food shopping actually zero waste?
I'll explain how the idea works using
chickpeas:
- Farmer harvests and prepares chickpeas for sale
- Puts chickpeas into stainless steel barrels
- Third party business that owns the stainless steel barrels, picks up the packaged chickpeas, transporting them to bulk food stores
- Bulk food store empty the chickpeas into their dispensers OR let's them sit on the floor for use straight from barrels
- Once barrels are empty, third party business collects barrel from bulk store, takes it to another location where it is clean/sterilised
- The newly cleaned barrels are then dropped back at the chickpea farm
- The circle continues
Tell me, what do you think of this
idea? Or is there a simpler idea on how to make zero waste shopping
truly without waste? How would you do it?
