In the week before Christmas Alex,Fair Food’s grocery buyer, sent a joyous email out ….
“The day has finally come – I can now say with confidence that all of our pre-packed dry goods come in biodegradable/ compostable packaging. Well, not quite – we still pack salad mix/cleaners etc in degradable plastic bags as we haven’t yet managed to find an appropriate alternative. But certainly the new compostable eco-cellophane bags we’ve introduced for our pre-packed dry goods (rice, nuts, dried fruit, legumes etc) are the greenest of all!”
Packaging is a long road, I mean ideally we’d just collect reusable containers from your house/food host fill them with your desired groceries and bring them back to you. We’re not there yet but in the meantime we’ve been on this continuing search for packaging that has a small energy footprint,comes from renewable sources and doesn’t leave our creeks lined with those apocalyptic plastic Christmas trees every time it floods.
So Alex found this eco-cellophane – which is made from cellulose, which is made from wood pulp, that is sustainably harvested from Forest Stewardship Council managed forests, that’s also been certified home compostable. There are bio-plastics around that say they’re compostable, which is true but only in an industrial-style hot composting facility not in your add-a-bit-at-a-time home compost or worm farm so we’re very excited that these eco-cellophane bags break down in a home compost in two weeks. They’re also marine degradable.
Oh and while we’re talking packaging, we’re continuing the No Box Left Behind Campaign from last year, where we’re asking you help save all the forests, all the lakefulls of water and all the kilowatts of energy that go into making the tens of thousands of Fair Food cardboard boxes we send out into the world each year.
You can get involved in NBLB simply by flat-packing your Fair Food cardboard boxes and leaving them out at your food host or your house for our drivers to pick up (same goes for all the eskys and frozen water bottles, just don’t flat-pack them).
