That stat about produce stickers got me thinking

I heard on a podcast last week that something like 15% of grocery store plastic waste comes just from those little produce stickers. And they're not recyclable because they're a different kind of plastic mixed with ink. I never really thought about it until I started noticing how many I peel off a single bag of apples or avocados. Has anyone found a way around this or do you just accept it as part of buying fresh stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

carr.brian3d ago

My girlfriend actually worked at a grocery store for a few years and she told me those stickers get stuck in the recycling machinery all the time... the workers hate them. She also said some people just eat them because they're technically food safe, which I tried once and it tasted like plastic and disappointment. But honestly I've been buying from a local farm stand lately and they just use a rubber band on the lettuce or a twist tie on the green beans. No stickers at all. It's a little more expensive but the produce tastes better and my counter is less cluttered with little sticky ghosts everywhere.

lucasking3d ago

Yeah the "little sticky ghosts everywhere" line really got me @carr.brian, because I feel like that's just how so much of our lives are set up now. We've designed all these tiny annoyances into everyday things that we just accept without thinking, you know? Like the stickers that don't stick well enough to stay on but stick too well to come off clean. It's this whole system of little frustrations that we're supposed to just deal with. And then you find out the people actually running the machinery hate them too, which is just another layer of the same pattern. It makes me wonder how many other things we've built that way, where nobody involved actually likes how it works but we just keep doing it because that's how it's always been done.