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So I read somewhere that apparently packaging can greatly increase the shelf life of the produce and so the overall waste is actually reduced by using packaging

So I read somewhere that apparently packaging can greatly increase the shelf life of the produce and so the overall waste is actually reduced by using packaging.

modo_mario 3y ago
Waste for the seller and potentialy consumer no? I'd argue the plastic wrap is more of a long term issue than the cucumber.
- gampleman 3y ago
  As far as I understood from a pollution perspective yes. But not from a carbon perspective. Farming, shipping, selling, etc. a cucumber to a consumer produces far more CO2 than a small piece of plastic wholesaled to a producer. So if you can reduce the waste, you need fewer cucumbers and apparently this adds up to a carbon reduction overall. Of course I think this shows the limits of the kind of thinking that reduces all environmental impact to just a single metric like carbon emissions.
  - gampleman 3y ago
    See for instance this paper: > In light of increasing public pressure, retailers strive to remove plastic packaging as much as possible from fresh fruits and vegetables to reduce the environmental impacts along their supply chains. Plastic packaging, however, also has an important protective function, similar to the fruit's peel. For cucumbers transported from Spain and sold in Switzerland, our investigations in the form of a life cycle assessment study showed that the plastic wrapping has a rather low environmental impact (only about 1%) in comparison to the total environmental impacts of the fruit from grower to grocer. Hence, each cucumber that has to be thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wraps. We found that plastic wrapping protects the environment more by saving more cucumbers from spoilage than it harms the environment by the additional use of plastic. If, by using the plastic wrap, we reduce cucumber losses at retail even by only 1.1%, its use has already a net environmental benefit. Currently, in the cucumber import supply chain from Spain to Switzerland, the use of plastic wrapping lowers the cucumber losses at retail by an estimated 4.8%; therefore, it makes sense to use it from an environmental perspective. The environmental benefit of food waste reduction due to plastic wrapping the cucumbers was found to be 4.9 times higher than the negative environmental impact due to the packaging itself. Alternative strategies to preserve fresh cucumbers without using plastic wrapping will have to compete with this challenging limit. https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucumber+packaging+LCA_Preprint_V1.pdf/44baa51d-e218-4c85-a970-03d6e6edc86e#:~:text=The%20supply%20chain%20of%20cucumbers%20without%20plastic%20wrap%20has%20an,is%20used%2C%20namely%204.6%25 https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucu....
  - modo_mario 3y ago
    firstly the difference is not that big if one considers the estimated % that would go to waste regardless. Disregarding all the things that aren't taken into account...their numbers at various points seem weird for me? The cost of the cucumbers themselves that they compare the plastic to is somehow huge? This has a huge impact on the result. In the study they're grown in Spain but you'd think they were grown only during winter in heated greenhouses with only artificial fertilisers given the amount of co2/kg per cucumber and that everything down to the farts of the pickers is accounted for. A different study looking at the co2 cost improvements from intercropping in Brasil comes up with numbers manyfold lower.. On the other hand the proportional amount of co2 released for plastic seems normal or even conservative And there's a lot of weird unexplained numbers. Why is landfill and incineration co2 results absent or higher when one doesn't use cucumbers? Is it assume that the cucumbers themselves all go to landfill at the same rate as the plastic? Should it be assumed if some 4% of cucumbers didn't go bad that stores would decrease their rackspace and cooling capacity or vice versa? Can we plainly translate this to a co2 cost increase like that down to the pallet? Because if the difference to reach for justification down the line is 1,1% then that can matter quite a lot especially given the lower amounts. If the difference in lorry co2 cost isn't fully realised and something else changes suddenly the difference falls apart for example. Given that a single truck legaly carries nearly 40-50 times the described amounts it isn't that hard to see that happen.

So I read somewhere that apparently packaging can greatly increase the shelf life of the produce and so the overall waste is actually reduced by using packaging.

modo_mario 3y ago

Waste for the seller and potentialy consumer no? I'd argue the plastic wrap is more of a long term issue than the cucumber.

gampleman 3y ago
As far as I understood from a pollution perspective yes. But not from a carbon perspective. Farming, shipping, selling, etc. a cucumber to a consumer produces far more CO2 than a small piece of plastic wholesaled to a producer. So if you can reduce the waste, you need fewer cucumbers and apparently this adds up to a carbon reduction overall. Of course I think this shows the limits of the kind of thinking that reduces all environmental impact to just a single metric like carbon emissions.
- gampleman 3y ago
  See for instance this paper: > In light of increasing public pressure, retailers strive to remove plastic packaging as much as possible from fresh fruits and vegetables to reduce the environmental impacts along their supply chains. Plastic packaging, however, also has an important protective function, similar to the fruit's peel. For cucumbers transported from Spain and sold in Switzerland, our investigations in the form of a life cycle assessment study showed that the plastic wrapping has a rather low environmental impact (only about 1%) in comparison to the total environmental impacts of the fruit from grower to grocer. Hence, each cucumber that has to be thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wraps. We found that plastic wrapping protects the environment more by saving more cucumbers from spoilage than it harms the environment by the additional use of plastic. If, by using the plastic wrap, we reduce cucumber losses at retail even by only 1.1%, its use has already a net environmental benefit. Currently, in the cucumber import supply chain from Spain to Switzerland, the use of plastic wrapping lowers the cucumber losses at retail by an estimated 4.8%; therefore, it makes sense to use it from an environmental perspective. The environmental benefit of food waste reduction due to plastic wrapping the cucumbers was found to be 4.9 times higher than the negative environmental impact due to the packaging itself. Alternative strategies to preserve fresh cucumbers without using plastic wrapping will have to compete with this challenging limit. https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucumber+packaging+LCA_Preprint_V1.pdf/44baa51d-e218-4c85-a970-03d6e6edc86e#:~:text=The%20supply%20chain%20of%20cucumbers%20without%20plastic%20wrap%20has%20an,is%20used%2C%20namely%204.6%25 https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucu....
- modo_mario 3y ago
  firstly the difference is not that big if one considers the estimated % that would go to waste regardless. Disregarding all the things that aren't taken into account...their numbers at various points seem weird for me? The cost of the cucumbers themselves that they compare the plastic to is somehow huge? This has a huge impact on the result. In the study they're grown in Spain but you'd think they were grown only during winter in heated greenhouses with only artificial fertilisers given the amount of co2/kg per cucumber and that everything down to the farts of the pickers is accounted for. A different study looking at the co2 cost improvements from intercropping in Brasil comes up with numbers manyfold lower.. On the other hand the proportional amount of co2 released for plastic seems normal or even conservative And there's a lot of weird unexplained numbers. Why is landfill and incineration co2 results absent or higher when one doesn't use cucumbers? Is it assume that the cucumbers themselves all go to landfill at the same rate as the plastic? Should it be assumed if some 4% of cucumbers didn't go bad that stores would decrease their rackspace and cooling capacity or vice versa? Can we plainly translate this to a co2 cost increase like that down to the pallet? Because if the difference to reach for justification down the line is 1,1% then that can matter quite a lot especially given the lower amounts. If the difference in lorry co2 cost isn't fully realised and something else changes suddenly the difference falls apart for example. Given that a single truck legaly carries nearly 40-50 times the described amounts it isn't that hard to see that happen.