Frazzled by all the plastic packaging on your produce?

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This week:

For years, Susie Murphy has been looking for an alternative to plastic packaging for the organic greens she grows and sells. 

The Antigonish, N.S.-based co-owner of Big Barn Little Farm has made an effort to reduce the amount of plastic the business uses in its farming operations. Yet, one aspect continues to elude her: how to sell her greens without single-use plastics. 

Murphy tried selling greens in bulk, encouraging customers to bring their own containers, but it didn't catch on. She hasn't found a plastic alternative at an affordable price that will biodegrade in the composting facilities in the area where she lives. 

"All we've come up with is a plastic bag — and everyone's trying to get rid of single-use plastics in every other aspect of our lives," she said. 

For Myra Hird, a professor in the school of environmental studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., Murphy's dilemma is "a very general and common problem."

Hird, who studies waste in Canada and globally, says individuals should "direct their energy away from feeling guilty about the amount of waste they're producing or the amount of packaging that they're buying," because it is largely out of the control of consumers. 

By the time a plastic-wrapped produce item is unpacked at the local grocery store, it has just a fraction of the packaging that would have been needed to ship it there in the first place. 

Rather than focusing on recycling some types of plastic, Hird says reducing is more crucial because "plastics are derived from fossil fuels." When plastic is recycled, the process still "requires more oil and or gas, so even when we're recycling plastics, we are using oil and gas," she said. 

In the EU, a law called the Packaging Waste Directive would require countries to look to companies making products — instead of the people buying them — to reduce plastic packaging.

In Germany, for example, the VerpackG law holds companies selling products "legally responsible for the packaging," said Hird. "This in turn gives companies incentives to move much more quickly and effectively towards … eco packaging design." 

That's because if a manufacturer is responsible for figuring out how to collect, dispose of or recycle its own packaging, it would likely want to produce less of it in the first place or make packaging that is more biodegradable or compostable.