There was a big announcement yesterday about reducing single use plastic. The oldest and largest commercial bakery in Canada is going to do away with those little plastic clips that come on their bread bags.
You know. Those annoying little things that never seem to want to go back on right. Or somehow manage to find a way to come unsealed as soon as you turn your back. They are being replaced with cardboard. And not just cardboard. Compostable cardboard.
Those little plastic clips are pretty small. How much plastic could this be taking out of the world? Two hundred metric tonnes annually. That’s a lot of little plastic clips. But we are talking about a big bakery with a lot of different brands. So this one small switch can make a big difference.
There will be a small sacrifice on our end. The company that makes the cardboard version of these little clips says they can probably be reused about eight times before they start to fall apart. That left me staring at a loaf of bread, counting the slices, and calculating how many times I open and close a bag of bread. More than eight, I’m betting. Which may leave me missing the little plastic clips.
Although it may not be a big deal. When I looked further into the dark recesses of the bread box, there seems to be an excess of them that have taken up permanent residence in the corners of the bread box. So I seem to have plenty.
Although it did make me wonder how big of an environmental problem this might be. If all the little clips seem to end up spending eternity in my breadbox, there can’t be many making it into the environment. But that’s okay. Every little bit helps.
And at the moment, I have plenty of the old ones to last me. But that’s what I thought about grocery bags. And I seem to have run out of them, or at least they’re in very short supply.
But there’s always twist ties.
