This movement was born in England on 26 March 2018. Its aim is to give plastic back to supermarkets and expose the excessive, unnecessary use of packaging on products. It works by gathering a group of people through social media at a given supermarket, doing the usual shopping and, once that’s done, outside the supermarket or right after the checkouts, they start unwrapping the products, leaving the packaging in the shopping trolleys. This simple, direct initiative, yet with such a powerful message, has been repeated in other European cities -Brussels, Lisbon, Paris, Oslo, Amsterdam, Madrid and many others-. One of its most recent actions took place on 15 September in Barcelona, at the Lidl supermarket in the Sant Antoni market. Around 20 people gathered and filled 2 trolleys with unnecessary packaging.
As we mentioned in the blog post “World Environment Day”, plastic is considered a material that takes a very long time to break down – for example, a plastic cup takes between 65 and 75 years to biodegrade, a bag can take between 10 and 100 years, and a (PET) water bottle between 500 and 1000 years-, and a lot of it ends up in the sea, where it is highly destructive and polluting. What’s worrying is that it breaks down into tiny particles which, getting mistaken for plankton, have already entered the food chain, and therefore our table. This initiative isn’t just a message for those in charge at supermarkets, manufacturers or distributors, but also a call for responsibility in our own shopping, aimed at eliminating single-use plastic. Alternatives do exist -bulk stores- so all that’s needed is to become aware of how unnecessary it is and how much it pollutes and, of course, let’s bring in the consumer’s 7 Rs! Reflect – Refuse – Reduce – Reuse – Recycle – Redistribute – Reclaim!
Sources: http://www.facebook.com/PlasticAttackGlobal/ https://plasticattackbarcelona.wordpress.com/ https://nastideplastic.wordpress.com/
