Thai supermarket wraps food in banana leaves instead of plastic

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Spotted: To cut the use of plastic, Rimping supermarket in Changmai, Thailand, has turned to wrapping some food products in banana leaves. The banana leaf packages are tied with a thin piece of bamboo. In Vietnam, The Ho Chi Minh City branch of Lotte Mart has begun wrapping vegetables in the leaves and hopes to expand the practice to other foods and stores.

So, why banana leaves? As globalcitizen.org explains, banana trees are easy to find in Thailand, and some can produce leaves as long as 3 metres. The leaves’ sturdiness also makes them a great candidate for packaging fast-selling fresh produce — “because they’re biodegradable, they can’t sit on the shelf for months.”

Other stores in Vietnam are embracing a variety of green packaging options. Lotte Mart also uses boxes made of sugarcane waste and wraps eggs in paper instead of plastic, while Big C offers biodegradable shopping bags made from corn powder.

Takeaway: Locally-sourced natural materials such as banana leaves may be another solution to the scourge of plastic bags. According to a 2015 study, Thailand and Vietnam are two of the five countries responsible for 60 percent of the plastic in the world’s oceans. Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea has banned disposable bags and Taiwan charges a fee for each bag used. In China, a ban on thin plastic bags has been in place since 2008, which has reduced their use by 66 percent. Globally, around 5 trillion plastic bags are used each year, and very few of these are ever recycled. Plastic bag bans have been enacted on a small scale, but much more needs to be done. Recent innovations include packaging made from soft rush and biodegradable plastic made from waste cooking oil.

Website: www.rimping.com
Contact: [email protected]

Source: New feed 1