Next week will be the grand opening of Vancouver’s first zero waste grocery store. Nada Grocery will finally open at 675 E Broadway on Wednesday, June 20th.
At Nada Grocery, you will only see just food and as their motto says “No packaging and no funny ingredients you can’t pronounce.” They work with the local food community to acquire high quality and responsibly sourced package-free foods from Vancouver and the lower mainland.
When you think of a supermarket, the word waste is probably something that rarely comes to mind. But the truth is, the trips we make to a typical grocery store is very wasteful. Think about how much plastic is involved or even the perishable food that does not sell. I’m sure we are all shocked at National Geographic’s June 2018 cover. Every minute in every day, a truckload of plastic enters our oceans. We are literally choking our planet with plastic that does not simply disappear. We are addicted to the plastic, it makes life faster, cheaper and easier for us. You’ll find plastic in nearly every aspect of your life. As of 2017, we have produced around 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic and is predicted to reach 34 billion tones by 2050. We are in a plastic catastrophe. It is easier and cheaper for corporations to provide plastic for their products. The citizens of the world need to be informed and responsible consumers. Nowadays, corporations are actively responding to public opinions. We, as individuals have the power to make a change, all it takes is the first step.
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Nada Grocery is part of a community that is taking an active stand against waste. They’re going beyond the average supermarket that charges 5 cents for plastic bags. They have removed all forms of unnecessary waste. When you’re there, you buy what you need, you don’t need to buy a whole packet of something when you only need one of it.
Every year, roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption (1.3 billion tons) is wasted. Even if just one-fourth of the food that is currently lost or wasted is saved, it would be enough to feed around 870 million people in the world. Around 40% of the food we purchase would end up in the bin as it goes bad before we get the chance to eat it. 193 million tonnes of greenhouse gas are emitted from wasted food (equal to emissions of 41 million cars driven continuously in a year), 17.6 billion cubic metres of water is wasted and 38.6 million cubic metres of landfill space is used.
In developed nations where overeating is basically a hobby, the fact that we grow more than what we can eat, drink or give away is heartbreaking. If society continues to live like this, the lives of our future generations look bleak.
Would you like some food with a side of plastic?
Nada Grocery