#Plasticfree bananas

A simple initiative to buy more eco-friendly bananas

Periodically thousands and thousands of young students remind us of the urgent need to step up efforts to protect our environment. Their movement is called Fridays for Future and is indeed a wake-up call for politicians across the World (“During the week of March 15, there were at least 1.6 million strikers on all 7 continents, in more than 125 countries and in well over 2000 places”, quoted in Fridays for future organization).

The main concern of our young people involved in Fridays for Future is climate change. Their fight (but also ours) against climate change requires strong action at all levels. Good intentions are not enough to achieve it: work is urgently needed.

And what can we bananas do to contribute to the fight against climate change?

We tend to think that complex and innovative measures are required to mitigate climate change. But this is not always so. Here we will explain one you can actively pursue.

Some actions can easily change the carbon footprint of a product

Think about our packaging. Do we bananas really need to be placed in a plastic bag for retail sale?

In the battle against climate change plastics have emerged as a core issue to handle. The world production of plastics grew from 1.5 million tonnes (Mt) per annum in 1950 to 322 Mt in 2015 (from The European Parlament).

The vast amounts of carbon emissions generated in the production of plastics could be reduced if we simply did away with single-use and short-lived plastic products. Nor should we forget the tons of plastic litter annually ending up in our oceans, harming the aquatic life.

Think about all the pointless, purposeless plastics you can use in a day. You can probably find better alternatives than plastic to package something.

Durability and recyclability are not alone in reducing the environmental footprint of a product, it may also be possible to forego generating the product altogether, avoiding such unnecessary waste as redundant plastic packages.

We, bananas, carry our own original packaging. However, many supermarkets insist in dressing us with a second bag that most times is made of plastic. Fortunately this scenario is changing and many brands are already busy searching for more eco-friendly alternatives.

For example, Max Havelaar France has recently announced that Carrefour will no longer package organic fair trade bananas in plastic bags; they will simply use an elastic band to distinguish them from the non-organic bananas. This means, just from this initiative, saving more than 23 tonnes of plastic per year.

So, let’s join the plastic-free initiatives and opt for a greener consumer culture.