AMSTERDAM: The plastic-free aisle, in an Ekoplaza branch in western Amsterdam, contains about 700 items, including meats, sauces, cereals, yogurt and chocolate. “It’s not just a marketing trick, it’s something we worked on for years,” Erik Does, the chief executive of Ekoplaza, said in an interview.
The opening of the supermarket aisle comes as the idea of banning plastic, or at least making more of it recyclable, gains supporters around the world.In January, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain called for plastic-free aisles in supermarkets in a speech outlining a 25-year environmental plan.
“One man’s plastic food wrapper, is another man’s problem,” Sutherland said. The proposals from the European Union and from Britain landed on the heels of a Chinese ban on all foreign plastic waste imports, which began in January. Rwanda has also begun a campaign that threatened public shaming and even prison time to tackle the plastics problem, making it illegal to import, produce, use or sell plastic bags and plastic packaging except within specific industries such as hospitals and pharmaceuticals. The nation is one of more than 40 around the world that have banned, restricted or taxed the use of plastic bags, including France and Italy. In a study published last year, scientists estimated that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced worldwide since the 1950s, when plastic began being mass produced. Of that, roughly 6.3 billion metric tons has been thrown away, 79 per cent of it in landfills or in other parts of the environment. Only 9 per cent of the discarded plastic has been recycled, according to the study, whose lead author is Roland Geyer of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
