INSIDE
JUNE 2017 BCBUSINESS 53
Whole foods? Great in theory, but in real life
inconvenient and annoying. Much better
to cut them up and enclose them in plastic.
Presumably that's why the Whole Foods
Market Inc. supermarket chain briey tried
marketing pre-peeled oranges in plastic
containers—at least until a Twitter user
named Nathalie Gordon came across the
product in a California store in 2016. Her
photo, posted with the comment "If only
nature would †nd a way to cover these
oranges so we didn't need to waste so much
plastic on them," inspired a furor and
forced Whole Foods to go back to the old-
school practice of selling oranges packaged
in orange peels.
Plastic has long been essential to
modern retailing—packaging, shipping and
branding. Sanitation, shelf life and bright
logos are among the advantages o‰ered
by plastic packaging. And the disadvan-
tages? Those are, so to speak, downstream.
"Plastic never biodegrades; it only gets
broken down into smaller and smaller
pieces called micro-plastics," says Brianne
Miller, co-founder of Zero Waste Market, a
package-free grocery store that has opened
various pop-up locations in Vancouver.
"Micro-plastics easily make their way into
the food chain when they are consumed by
animals and †sh lower on the food chain,"
Miller adds. "When these †sh and birds
Taking
the Wrap
ILLUSTRATION: KAGAN McLEOD
Plastic creates
problems that last
forever. It's time
businesses reduced
its use in packaging
by Steve Burgess
Blinded by the gaslight ... Instruments of joy ... Laceless kicks ... Sacramento's new gold rush ... + more
J U N E 2 0 17
"It's a crazy place —you stay up all
night partying, at 7 a.m. you run
with the bulls, and then you have a
Hemingway [cocktail] when you're
done" –p.62
Off lıne
E V E R Y B O D Y ' S TA L K I N '
WATERCOOLER
