Supermarket giant Sainsbury's has made drastic changes to the packaging of a popular fruit. If you’re looking to make an avocado toast or a healthy breakfast bowl, you will no longer find the green, creamy fruit wrapped up in plastic.
As of this month, Sainsbury’s is introducing paper packaging across its own-brand Ripe & Ready Avocados twin pack. Though currently being trialled across just 77 supermarkets, once it achieves full roll-out, the chain claims it will save 20.2 million pieces of plastic a year. The new recyclable packaging is made of a mixture between paper and bamboo netting, making it fully degradable and much friendlier to the environment.
Image:
Getty)Claire Hughes, Sainsbury’s Director of Product and Innovation said: “Switching to paper packaging across our Ripe & Ready Avocados twin pack is one of the many steps we are taking to fulfil our commitment towards a greener future. The initiative reflects our continuous efforts to help develop more sustainable and innovative packaging solutions and we’re excited for our customers to try out the new packaging in-store".
Sainsbury’s is also incentivising customers by making the avocados available on Nectar Prices, for £1.35 in supermarkets and online. This will offer Nectar customers a saving of 30p until January 25, compared to the price of £1.65 without Nectar.
The change is part of several initiatives that the UK’s second-largest supermarket chain has taken to reduce its carbon footprint. Last year, Sainsbury’s made the move from plastic to cardboard punnets across a range of its Taste the Difference berries and cherries, which will help the company save over 160 tonnes of plastic per year. In a similar move, they also switched to using cardboard mushroom punnets, which has saved around 775 tonnes of plastic each year.
Over the past few years, UK supermarkets have come under fire for their high use of plastic in products. In fact, it was found in one recent analysis that British supermarkets produce 29.8 billion tonnes of avoidable plastic waste annually – while a jawdropping 70% of all food products on the shelves contain the nonrenewable material.
The overuse of plastic has long been a major contributor to climate change. Produced using planet-heating fuels like coal, oil and gas, plastic is designed to be light, durable and multifunctional. An unfortunate consequence of this, however, is that plastic also biodegrades incredibly slowly, taking anywhere from 20 to 500 years to break down.
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