Those little fucking stickers on fruit

There are things that bother me, because they are stupid, pointless, irresponsible, and shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

How many million pieces of fruit do you think are eaten daily in the western world? For argument’s sake, let’s just conservatively say it’s 1,000,000 from conventional farms and mainstream supermarket retailers – it’s probably much more than that, but that’s fine, we’ll just say it’s 1.

Each of these pieces of fruit has a small plastic ( non-biodegradable ) sticker on it, with a number that means absolutely nothing to the consumer. So we’ve just taken a perfectly biodegradable packaging ( the skin ), and added an utterly pointless ( to the consumer ) non-biodegradable component.

Each of these stickers is maybe 1.25cm^2 in area, but probably only 1/10th of 1mm thick. However 1,000,000 of those per day equals 100×10^3mm thickness of plastic ( or 100m ), which over the course of a year equals approximately 35,000m x their area ( 0.0125m^2 ), or approximately 500 m^3 ( cubic volume ) of plastic and glue.

That might not sound like much, but remember:

  • this is just one of countless sources of plastics ( and other non-biodegradable / toxic materials ) entering the environment;
  • there’s no good reason for doing it, given that the consumer neither requires nor benefits from the sticker info;
  • whatever purpose the producers, distributors, and retailers use it for could easily be achieved without it;
  • similarly there’s no reason they couldn’t do it with recycled non-bleached paper and natural glue;
  • it’s being distributed into the environment by pure accident, with no one taking responsibility, without any capacity to track it, and it’s virtually impossible to remove all of it, with the only means to remove any of it being largely manual ( finding it and picking it up );
  • while released in the environment, while small, it can still cause trouble, as it can be swallowed by birds, fish, and other life, gradually clogging their digestive tract &/or choking them;
  • when an animal dies from ingesting plastics, it’s body degrades then the plastics are re-released into the environment to claim their next victim;
  • capitalism created this problem, has made no effort to publicise it or look for a solution, no one thinks about it, and the problem continues.

If you look around, you will find countless examples of this kind of insane thinking … I could randomly walk out of the door and wander down the street, and spot dozens of examples of this on any given day.

Please explain how this isn’t a flaw in the economic paradigm – ie: to motivate this behaviour and label it “profitable” (?)

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