Plastic rocks on an isolated island
The sombre message of stones made of plastic found on an uninhabited island far from the Brazilian coast.
Revolutionary: France’s ‘très simple’ alternative to plastic packaging
12 April 2021
The refill revolution has started in France. A new law will make it possible to shop plastic-free in supermarkets. And that is fantastic news!
France is turning a corner and putting its efforts into a systemic change that will drastically reduce the use of single-use packaging plastic.
Many other countries are taking the ‘strategy of low-hanging fruit’. The Netherlands is one of these with its supermarket chains promising to reduce their plastic use by 20% by 2025 compared to 2017 levels, primarily by using less plastic for each packaging. But the number of products packed in plastic will not or will hardly change.
FRENCH CITIZENS DEMAND REFILL
France’s President Macron has appointed a citizen council for the climate and has promised to adopt its recommendations. One of the recommendations of the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat (in French) addresses limiting plastic packaging by adopting refill systems.
The idea is simple. Bring your own container or bag to the supermarket and fill it with pasta, nuts, rice or a host of other products. You reuse your own packaging. The shop or supermarket buys the products in bulk. The factory no longer needs to weigh every product and does not need to use single-use packaging anymore.
The French Government translated the proposal into law. By 2030, 20% of the floor surface of shops larger than 400 square metres must be fitted with refill systems. The law, that still has to be approved by the Senate, thus mostly targets the large supermarkets.
KEEP FRESH BAGS AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THIN PLASTIC BAGS
If you look closely, you will see a slow start of the refill concept in Dutch supermarket chains. At a small scale some supermarkets offer the facility of ‘tapping’ nuts or muesli from large containers, but these unfortunately go into paper bags.
Albert Heijn recently announced (in Dutch) that it will definitely stop providing the thin plastic bags at the vegetable and fruit departments. Instead, it will offer washable ‘keep fresh bags’. The idea is that you bring your own keep fresh bags from home, wash them and reuse them. In Belgium, Delhaize recently started experimenting (in Dutch and French) with refill stations for the ecological cleaning products of Ecover. This too is an example of refilling.
But the refill concept is barely being embraced by large supermarkets. Up to now, chains such as Albert Heijn are primarily reducing their plastic consumption by making the plastic packaging thinner.
GOOD EXAMPLES ATTRACT FOLLOWERS
You pay for what you ‘tapped’ and in so doing help avoid waste. In the Netherlands, the Ekoplaza is the supermarket chain that has made most progress with the refill concept. A good initiative is Zero Waste Nederland’s window sticker. Almost 6,000 shops and hospitality outlets (in Dutch) show that you are welcome on the premises with your own cup, bag or container. They are good, mostly local, initiatives that are slowly gaining ground.
However, a real systems change is needed to achieve zero waste. The Dutch Government should thus follow the French example. Without the legal requirement to make a certain part of the shop space refill, the promises in reducing plastic use will remain empty promises.
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