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Bye Bye, Wasteful Packaging!

Keerthana Kirubagaran
2. Mai 2017
2 Min. Lesezeit

Through the module but also through the blog posts by class mates, I’ve learnt many ways to be more sustainable. I was particularly surprised by how simple things in my daily life could lead to a greener future.

I was brainstorming to find a new topic to write about for this blog and remembered an article on www.20minutes.ch about big grocery stores introducing a price for the plastic bags at the counters. The newly introduced price is CHF 0.05 for a bag. When the plastic bags were freely available, Migros and Coop together distributed 240 million bags every year. But now, the result was enormous: at Migros the ‘sale’ of these bags had a decline of 80% and at Coop it was even 85%. It seems that those CHF 0.05 caused a rethinking and many people started bringing their own bags.

I was wondering if there are further possibilities to avoid the packaging. On the internet, I came across ‘Original Unverpackt’, a store in Berlin that sells all its products without any packaging. The customers are encouraged to bring their own (reusable) containers, jars or bottles that are then filled with the items they need. This way the wasteful packaging is avoided and food waste can be minimized as customers can buy just the amount they need.

Among others, daily used products such as wheat, rice, tea herbs and even toothpaste are sold. Moreover, the shop also sells reusable containers.

Looking further into it, I figured out there are zero-packaging stores in Basel, Biel and Luzern. A similar shop, Palette, will open its doors in Bern soon. Until then, you can still cut down on packaging by planning ahead and trying to bring your own reusable bags to transport your purchased goods.