Packaging, piñatas, and punching up not down

Why you shouldn’t leave your packaging at the supermarket checkout, and what you should do instead

The growing awareness of the impact of plastic pollution is being matched by an increasing awareness that plastic recycling is not the panacea it has been sold to us as – plastic can only be recycled into a lower quality product than the original, may be shipped overseas rather than recycled at all, and the greatest push for recycling came from the plastics industry itself as an alternative to regulation of its output. Given these facts more and more people are taking a rather startled look at the amount of single use plastic their weekly shopping comes wrapped in, and understandably want to do something about it. A popular campaign that has I’ve seen widely proposed on social media is that we should all unwrap our shopping at supermarket checkouts and leave the plastic packaging for the supermarkets to take back and deal with. While this idea is intuitively appealing, unfortunately I would argue that it is unlikely to have much of an effect on supermarket policy but is likely to have an extremely negative impact on checkout staff.

The people who will have to clear away any plastic left at the checkout staff are not company executives responsible for making packaging decisions, but checkout staff who have no means of feeding back to senior management about company policy. Not only will this action not be recorded as a protest, the packaging will probably not be disposed of with consideration for minimising its environmental impact but in all likelihood just stuffed in the bin under the till as quickly as possible. This is because checkout staff have targets they have to meet for how quickly they process each customer, and will be penalised (or even lose their jobs if they are still within their probation period) if they don’t meet them. So not only is this action unlikely to be effective towards the goal of influencing supermarket packaging policy, the only people it is likely to harm are people in insecure, high pressure jobs with no control over the policies that shape their working lives, let alone the wider policies of their organisation.

Frontline customer service staff have no means of influencing management policy

I once had an extremely illuminating conversation with someone who used to work for a major airline, who told me that within his team frontline company service staff were referred to as piñatas. I have no idea whether this terminology went beyond his particular office or whether it was management sanctioned, but the idea was that these staff were set out as tempting targets to absorb customer frustration and anger at policies that they couldn’t change so that that anger didn’t get through to disturb management levels. When the piñatas broke they could be easily replaced.

Even if they don’t articulate it quite this clearly, after that rather chilling conversation I started noticing just how many companies with policies that frustrate customers employ piñatas to divert customer anger, in easily recognisable livery of the company so that they are seen as its representative but who have no influence over its policies whatsoever. Train companies providing a terrible service, but placing convenient people on platforms to be shouted at by commuters who can’t get to work on time is the perfect example. Companies providing telephone helplines have started outsourcing this jobs to India, where the piñatas are cheaper and even more quick and easy to replace. And of course supermarkets have checkout staff and shelf stackers in bright, easily spotted uniforms emblazoned with the company name who are very visibly putting out plastic-wrapped cucumbers and then taking your money for them, but have less control over this fact than you do. Your purchasing power is valuable to the company whereas their labour is easily replaceable so is not.

The first rule of comedy is that you should always punch up, not down; that is to say that your should only make jokes at the expense of those more powerful or privileged in society than yourself because mocking those least privileged is just bullying. I really think this principle should be more widely known and applied in the environmental movement, that actions should only harm those with more power than you, not people in low paid, low security jobs with less. Unfortunately, just as some environmentalists don’t seem to realise that the people who’ll be responsible for removing their stickers and graffiti are the lowest paid contracted cleaning staff, rather than the members of the board of the company they’re targeting, or that you need a certain level of economic security to be able to take a week off work to get arrested, many people don’t realise that actions like dumping packaging usually only end up harming people whose lives are harder than theirs are.

So how can you get through to the people who do actually make the policies? Take your packaging home and post it to the company’s head office. It still probably won’t be disposed of sustainably, but will be recorded as feedback and is more likely to inconvenience people who actually make supermarket policy, rather than those who are simply most. I have compiled a list of head offices or customer service addresses of the biggest UK supermarkets by market share, accurate as of June 2019, as well as links to their feedback email addresses, phone numbers or contact forms if you would like to explain why you are concerned about packaging. It’s worth bearing in mind though that the people responding to feedback will also be piñatas – the mechanism by which you can affect company policy is not by getting angry with them, but by having your feedback logged as a datapoint showing that customers are concerned about sustainability.

So given their labour practices, packaging policies and ability to trap farmers in insecure contracts that may end up with food being left to rot in the fields because the price offered for it is lower than the cost of harvesting it, would it not be better to avoid supermarkets altogether? Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.

Supermarkets are undeniably convenient – for people who work the standard nine to five thirty pattern during the week, and have voluntary or domestic commitments at the weekends, they may be the only grocery shops open at accessible times. And the inconvenience of having to visit many different shops to buy different foods shouldn’t be underestimated either. In his book “A Greedy Man in a Hungry World“, Jay Rayner quotes a friend of his mother’s who remembers shopping before supermarkets allowed you to pay for everything in one place.

“Oh God, it was a whole morning’s outing.” she told me “You’d have to clear the diary…People romaticise things like butter being sold in blocks and you asking for a bit to be cut off, but you wouldn’t romaticise it if you had to do it every bloody week. It takes so long.”

A recent report found that in heterosexual couples women still do ten times as much of the unpaid work of maintaining a homelife – cleaning, child care and elder care – as men do. Given this domestic labour distribution it seems likely that if food shopping were more time consuming the additional burden would fall disproportionately on women.

Furthermore, due to economies of scale in purchasing supermarkets can almost always sell food more cheaply than independent shops can. A recent report (pdf) found that an adult would need to spend £41.93 on food per week to meet government nutritional guidelines, but that for nearly 30% of households this was a quarter or more of their disposable income after housing costs.  And many people already struggle to afford any food at all. Foodbank use in the UK is increasing year on year, which should be a scandal in a country as wealthy as we are. Given these facts we should certainly not be making assumptions or judging people for the ethics of the company from which they buy their food. We also need far more awareness that political change to ensure that all people have access to the basics for a decent quality of life, including fresh, nutritious food, is as much part of environmental activism as campaigning against plastic is.

Finally, it’s worth being aware that plastic packaging does serve a useful purpose, by reducing food waste. Punnets stop soft fruits and tomatoes from getting crushed in transit, cellophane wrap protects vegetables from desiccation. I have been unable to track down an original source for the figure, but this article says that when a UK supermarket experimented with shipping fruit without plastic its spoilage rates doubled. And while spoiled produce will biodegrade, unlike plastic packaging, all the fossil fuels burned in its cultivation and transport and the water, pesticides and labour used to grow it will have been wasted. The same article states that a cellophane-wrapped cucumber will last fourteen days, whereas an unwrapped one will last only three. Given that households in the UK are estimated to throw away 4.4 million tonnes of avoidable food waste (food that could have been eaten but went off first), packaging that extends shelf life is not necessarily a bad thing.

While there are alternatives to plastic, they are more expensive and switching to them would therefore reduce the profit the supermarket would make on each item. The only circumstances under which they would shift therefore would be if they were convinced customers would pay more for the item or buy more of them as a result of the change to more sustainable packaging, which is where providing them feedback that environmental issues are a concern for customers is helpful, or if they were forced to by legislation. I would therefore recommend writing to your MP asking them to legislate for all packaging to be home compostable, returnable or genuinely recyclable by 2030, and by voting at the next available opportunity for an MP and a government likely to care about sustainability, economic justice and labour rights and food poverty.