What happens when you dump packaging at the till?

gromituk

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule wrote:

Goto a real food shop and you can smell food.

You're missing my point. If you go to a real food shop, the food will be wrapped for you in a clean and hygenic way. Removing all packaging at the till is like the butcher handing you a string of sausages and expecting you to carry them home slung into a shopping bag. And if you read the article carefully, you will see that sausages are precisely what was being unwrapped.

Etheco_2

Great thread, I've been banging on about excess packaging for years but I never thought to do this, now I have to actually get up the nerve to do it!

Of course, some packaging is necessary, I wouldn't want to buy stuff if I thought people had been pawing it and coughing and sneezing all over it.

morlandbanks

At first I was just really amused by this and felt a little sorry for the reporters - but I'm now thinking - what a great idea!

I can see supermarkets having to allocate special area for customers to 'unwrap'. What with the Gov trying to introduce charging by weight for rubbish collection, I can see the idea really catching on!

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule

Etheco wrote:

Of course, some packaging is necessary, I wouldn't want to buy stuff if I thought people had been pawing it and coughing and sneezing all over it.

You are eating food that has (most likely, unless you get VON vegetables) been grown in animal faeces, that comes out of the soil where animals urinate and defaecate.

People 'pawing' your food is the least of your worries.

I like continental style markets, where people just paw away all they want to select the items they require. And then they put them into their basket without wrapping. the horror of it....

going2die_rich

I some how doubt the people who make the decisions will even find out if one in three dumped their packaging at the till, let alone the minority that would even do it.

All that will happen is the manager of the staff at the tills will tell them it's now their job to put it in the bin. So it'll never be passed up the chain. Thats if the staff member doesn't get you thrown out of the store for littering.

Just another MP saying something to win the green tree hugger vote without even thinking it through.

Will they be doing it? I think not, but they are happy to tell tree hugging fools to do it.

The only way packaging will decrease is if thier is either a law or the supermarkets can save money, hence increase profits from it.

Who has time to do it or even cares enough to do it? If you feel that strongly about it you'd be better off spending the 10 minutes a week you'd be wasting pulling off the packaging at work, claim some overtime and then plant a tree when you get enough money.

gromituk

going2die_rich wrote:

Who has time to do it or even cares enough to do it?

Quite a lot of us, I think you'll find. Not everyone is as defeatist about the environment as you appear to be.

tiredwithtwins

gromituk wrote:

Quite a lot of us, I think you'll find.

lol ... i do this too!!!
I try and buy loose veg whenever possible and when its weighed at the checkout I find i have to keep saying ''no, i dont want it put in a bag'' over and over again!!!
I take apples out of the bags if i happen to buy them, and if I have to buy meat I usually ask the checkout person to tell her manager I object to having to throw plastic wrapping in the bin just cos they cant use paper wrappers!
Checkouts close when they see me coming ... :rotfl:

look out for me in archer road sainsburys/hillsborough morrisons/handsworth asda in sheffield ... It makes my day to make the processed packaging brigade tut!!!

Seakay

I find over-packagaing very frustrating, especially as our council does not recycle all packaging that theoretically can be, never mind the stuff that can't be.
HOWEVER
I do remember in the 1970s there was a movement to return excess packaging, aimed at M&S I think, where people would be stationed at the doors asking you to go back with all the unnecessary stuff. The trouble was (and is) that it is the head office that makes the decisions based on health and safety regulation, market forces and shareholder demands, but it is the shop staff who get all the hassle even though they have no power to change anything. This 1970s campaign fizzled out, mostly, I think, because the wrong targets were being chosen.
I think that the enviroment minister is a publicity seeking hypocrite. He is part of a government that is partially responsible for the proliferation of packaging and he is dumping loads of work on minimum wage staff.
By all means, send letters, excess packaging etc to CEOs, company HQs and whoever else you can think of, but please don't take your frustrations out on the wrong target just because the government wants a good headline and to shift some blame.

woollyjumper

I agree with not having all this packaging ... but if I do leave all the packaging on the checkout till - 3 days later want to use my food - where are my cooking instructions ? mmmm.... back at the shop. I would rather take it home in the packaging and ensure the stuff does get recycled.

BungleGirl

Thinking about all this I remember reading a coupld of months ago about a longstanding campaign against McDonalds where local people collected any McDonalds litter and took it back to them and if I remember correctly some actually sent it to their head office.

I don't think that the campaign was actually about the over packaging, probably about the volume of McD's litter on the streets and possibly the materials they use. I have googled for the details but can't seem to put in the right words of phrase to find it.

I'm sure that I read about it on the McSpotlight website - if anyone has better searching skills than me please post the link because I think it was quite inspiring.

It was done on quite a grand scale I beleive in conjunction with the McLibel case so it was I guess just another way for people to campaign against McD's but I thought it was cool!