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Comment by hn23 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile all my vegetables, fruits etc is double packed or I pay three times the price for unpacked stuff. In my home the amount of plastics I have to put into the yellow bin has quadrupled over the last 10years.

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I don’t really get why they styropak fruits and vegetables in parts of Asia and Europe. I’m not talking bags, actual trays wrapped in plastic film—as chicken meat in a US supermarket.

Unfortunately even the US is catching up to this trend where things are portioned out in standard packs (rather than loose).

You can see how different countries have different customs for storing their goods here [1], this was linked few days ago in a diff thread, but is illustrative.

[1]https://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Hungry-Planet-F...

This is very much a regional thing, in my experience. E.g. in parts of the Southeastern US, I found that plastic+styrofoam overpackaging was ubiquitous as far back as the 1980s. In markets I've been to in parts of the Northeast and Northwest in decades since, it's been virtually nonexistent to entomb produce in plastic – bulk produce has been the norm.

Oddly I’m seeing this packing creep in in places like Trader Joe’s and some other (small) independents, not so much the big chains, thankfully.

Trader Joe's, a small indie? Try "owned by one of the Aldis".

Yeah sorry, I missed the Oxford comma there. Those are separate sets.

Fair!

If I understand that correctly, I think it is the opposite in the US. The packaged fruits and vegetables costs a lot more. Perhaps for the convenience value and mostly in affluent grocery stores.

Usually this reduces waste. I bet we'll see the next panic about food waste.

This kills me when my wife brings home 8 apples from Costco that come in a double blister pack of hard plastic.

Are you sure your fruit and veg are wrapped in plastic and not cellulose based cellophane?

mine dropped almost to zero since I am a member of a FoodCoop.

You pay trice the price because shelf life of unpacked vegetables is considerably shorter, necessitating more food waste and/or more involved logistics. These extra costs are factored in.

Where is this?

Austria. In Germany it is the same ir worse. They introduced a deposit fee on plastic bottles a few years ago because the percentage of glas bottles sold was too low. So all super markets started to create their own proprietary bottles (only to be returned to the originator; not any shop as a glas bottle) and now even more plastic bottles are sold and not returned. Markets like REWE or ALDI make some extra money.

Germany has a return rate of PET single-use bottles with deposit of 98.8%. Of which ~95% are recycled.

I wonder how much the numerator is biased by fraud like:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/05/fraudster-made...

and

https://www.toytowngermany.com/forum/topic/52114-lithuanian-...

Apparently you could produce fake bottles for a few cents and get a 5-15x return.

I'm not sure about the prevalence of this issue today but about 10 years ago I helped create a fraud protection system specifically targeted at deposit return fraud.

However, at the time at least the problem apparently wasn't so much people manipulating return machines but rather bottles miraculously appearing out of nowhere from within the system (i.e. parties trying to register a bunch of bottles more than once or attempting to remove bottles in-between checkpoints in order to "reuse" them later on).

My point is: The idea of the law was to reduce the plastic output but quite the opposite happened. Every bigger company introduced their own version of plastic bottles you cannot bring somewhere else.

Also your number is also very specific: Are there non PET single use bottles as well? What counts as recycling anyway. Shipping to China? Burning?

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