Tips for a sustainable grocery trip

By Shayon Banerjee

When entering a grocery store, most people don’t take the time to stop and think about making eco-friendly choices. Instead, their sole objective is to purchase the food that they need for the day or week. However, through the haste of wanting to go in and out of a grocery store as fast as we can, we must realize that we should make sustainable choices when grocery shopping. This blog post explores a few tips for eco-friendly grocery shopping.

1. Bring your own reusable bags

Disposable bags are terrible for the environment. Plastic bags are not biodegradable or recyclable, resulting in millions of bags reaching landfills every year. Therefore, making the switch to reusable bags is a simple choice with a large environmental impact.

2. Transition into a more plant-based diet

Eating a plant-based diet can lower your negative impact on the environment. Additionally, eating more vegetables can lower your overall expenditure while shopping. Using reusable produce bags is also a great tip when picking up vegetables at the grocery store.

3. Minimizing food waste

Food waste is a major global issue. With many malnourished individuals around the world, it’s important we do our part in ensuring we don’t waste food. Food waste is a tremendous contributor to greenhouse gasses, as well as very expensive. We need to also ensure we are not easily manipulated by sales, and only buy what we actually need. When in doubt, we should try our best to buy less.

4. Read all the labels

Often food products are labelled with fair-trade, organic, safe catch, non-gmo, and other social association logos. Reading the labels on food products will allow us to ensure the foods we are buying are as good for the environment as possible. There are many resources online to help better understand these labels including this one.

5. Buy food in season

When we purchase food out of season, we are encouraging products to be shipped over long distances. Instead, by choosing to purchase certain items when they are in season and grown locally, we can lessen the environmental impact of the transportation involved.

Therefore, these are a few tips on making eco-friendly choices when grocery shopping.