Waste

Waste

Wednesday 7 December 2016

Profuse Pomelo Packaging Strikes Again

My husband picked up a pomelo the other day at the grocery store and sure enough, it came packaged just like the last one I bought. We're not sure if this is some new trend, as we never used to see packaging on pomelos before, but it should stop. It's wasteful and unnecessary overpackaging that uses precious resources for no reason at all.

A pomelo is a citrus fruit that has a perfect package of its own. Its peel is thick and certainly doesn't need to be surrounded by a mesh net, plastic wrap, and a plastic ribbon (this one had pictures of fruit on it instead of pandas like in my last pomelo post).

The mesh net and ribbon are not recyclable as far as I can figure and will end up in the landfill.

This is heading to the landfill and it's not even necessary.
The plastic cling wrap, while one might throw it into a bag of old shopping bags and take it to a recycling facility, will probably be thrown out by most people and in any event is totally unnecessary.

Who knows what the purpose of this plastic cling wrap is.
 This is such a prime example of overpackaging, a package, around packaging, around fruit that has its own package.
All of this packaging for a single piece of fruit that's in its own package!

This beautiful and very large citrus (pomelos taste rather like a milder or sweeter grapefruit and are thought to be what grapefruits may have originated from) does not need this package. It is not fragile and vulnerable to squishing like a mandarin orange. Some of them you could probably break a window with they're so large and heavy, so I don't know how cling wrap and plastic mesh and ribbons are contributing to protecting them in transit or preserving them in the store.

The pomelo looks beautiful on its own, not wrapped in layers of wasteful plastic.

With a peel this thick there's no need for all that plastic.

Clearly, this is yet another example of overpackaging.

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