Quote Originally Posted by benshep View Post
it's not supermarkets. it's society - the consumer, all of us! retail and manufacturing industry provide what the consumer demands with their spending power and habit. sldo bear in mind plastic itself is not evil - the problem is what we as society do with it. how we consume and discard. the way to tackle it is a very complex social and economic issue. there need to be priorities such as reducing use of difficult-to-recycle plastics; designing it out of the supply chain; in some cases bans on single-use plastics such as stirrers and cotton buds are justified.

every single person needs to take responsibility for their own behaviours.

to say supermarkets are 'to blame' is naive and arrogant, in my view.

and don't forget that plastic pollution is only one of many many environmental and societal issues we should be concerned with, and not necessarily THE priority.
To blame supermarkets isn’t either naive of arrogant, as a consumer I want to buy something say a cake, I can’t change the way the supermarket decides to package my cake, I’d happily buy my cake wrapped in recyclable paper packaging but they don’t offer it, and believe me I have emailed supermarket head offices to voice my concern over their overuse of packaging for single items, it could be argued that I don’t need to buy the cake and could make it myself but again the flour, eggs, butter etc etc all come in multiple packaging.
The consumer doesn’t have an influence upon what packaging the manufacturers choose to use, look at bars of chocolate, using a KitKat as an example, I don’t eat many but I do like one they were better when they came in foil and paper,but for some reason (it will be cost based) the manufacturer decided to encase them in plastic, as a consumer I can only complain, I can’t change it, I don’t buy as many KitKats but I’ve sure that is of no consequence as they’ve saved a lump of cash.