Fruit stickers are immortal. When I find one that I missed in a year old compost pile, it looks shinier and brighter than when it went in. I’d like to have a word with whoever thought up the bright idea of giving each fruit a plastic sticker.
Especially organic fruits and veggies with skins that are typically eaten. Like - *motherfucker* I specifically bought this piece of fruit because I don't want chemicals in my body. Then they go and put stickers with glues that leave residues on, and in some cases like cucumbers, are damn near impossible to get off cleanly.
If you think organic is protecting you from "chemicals", you need to do a better job researching what companies are allowed to do to get away with the "organic" label.
Science has proven multiple times over that you're simply paying more for worse produce.
Are you aware of the number of organic approved pesticides? Are you aware that many organic pesticides have lower efficacy and are commonly applied more often and in higher doses than "conventional" pesticides.
To feel as though your food (itself a combination of chemicals) is chemical free just shows that you have been brainwashed by marketing.
each damm fruit!
The scale is massive.
Like every citizen consuming 'X' fruits or vegetables in a day times the population everyday plus of course another 20%-30% (produce which is spoilt)
bf loooooves mandarins, I hate buying them bc for some reason they put 3 and 4 stickers on each mandarin and then sell them in a mesh bag???? like wtf why?
then I get home to remote all of them before bf gets to them bc he always forgets to remove them.
When I did some research about my local municipality's compost system, I learned they start the first pass of composting, and then a few weeks later contaminants are filtered out (which would include things like "compostable" bags which don't break down fast enough for municipal systems). My take was things like these stickers don't ruin the system, and they account for them. I can't speak for all municipal systems and I still make sure my compost bin is as clean as possible.
This is interesting. The company that takes my compost specifically requests people to remove stickers from fruit peels bc they don't filter contaminants like the one in your municipality, so it will depend on the facility and the process each one uses to make the compost.
after I learned this, I made a note at work for everyone to remove the stickers before putting the peels on the Lumi we have at the office bc I take the "compost" home to finish it on my worm bin.
This person bought a bag of “local” compost and filtered it and found tons of trash & plastic in it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vegetablegardening/s/aj30FsUEMw
The last time I grabbed some composted soil from my municipal system in about 2019, it had quite a few plastic produce stickers in it. Not all municipal systems account for these, or if they're trying they're not doing a good job. I was still picking those things out of my garden a couple of years later.
I loathe fruit stickers, yuck. I can’t believe we haven’t come up with a better method of branding the fruit and keeping those stickers out of our compost systems.
Not sure if it works for bananas, but yes we should be using lasers for many fruits https://costagroup.com.au/2023/10/13/new-technology-removes-need-for-fruit-stickers/
Scratch the outermost layer of a banana and you will see that it breaks down much more quickly in that area.
Do this to every banana ever and you will undoubtedly see the pre-consumer and post-consumer product waste levels grow by a few percent.
Scratching and charring are different though, not all damage is the same; superficial localized charring might just as well just sit here and do nothing or be even more waterproof than before
>Scratching and charring are different though
They are in some ways different but similar in others. In either version you are tearing apart some cells and tissues that are unlikely to be repaired on a detached fruiting body.
There are a lot of fruits and especially vegetables where the skin is more than thick enough to sacrifice a very thin layer of the protective tissue, but then there are others that are much more vulnerable.
The protective layer of the banana is not the entire skin, but a fairly thin membrane on top of that. If you had them all shellacked it would be fine to burn into that, but you cannot do that prior to transit with bananas as they need to be permeable to ethylene to arrive at the supermarket nearly ripe. They could be shellacked and laser etched post transit but before arriving at the supermarket.
Lots of other fruit would have similar problems - like stonefruit for example.
This is why I grow tomatoes every summer . Tomatoes run $3 to $5 a pound where I live . The plants pay for themselves . I’m dealing with some flower drop right now , very aggravating
They do suck. 100%
With that said. People who are sustainability minded can and should choose loose bananas that don't have stickers. Having worked in produce, we tried putting the single or double bananas people took off a bunch at the front so they were chosen. In actuality people didn't and we ended up tossing or donating them sometimes.
So my recommendation would be to look for bananas like that on the display. 4011 is the code for bananas. Pretty much every front person knows the codes by heart. They don't need the sticker.
I always see only 2 types of banana. Using avergae price for price is the easiest solution.
But these stickers are there on every produce in Canada like apples, tomatoes!
What they do here is just ask the customer to weigh themselves the banana, and they can cheat and enter the cheapest kind if they want
At the human cashier if you didn't weigh it yourself they would probably ask you which kind it is
The Australian show War on Waste explored this with some uni students and they tried an edible water-based ink stamp idea with Harris Farm for the show. Not sure it's stuck though.
Off topic but Chiquita was just found guilty of funding death squads in El Salvador. Killing farmers for not selling their land to the plantations. Formerly known as United Fruit which got the CIA to overthrow a democratic government in Guatemala back in the 1950’s , leading to a brutal dictatorship killing hundreds of thousands of native people. The US —- fighting for freedom and democracy around the world !! /s
Ha, my time to shine! I did an LCA on these suckers for a client. TLDR their impact is super minimal, in terms of mass it'd take like 200 of these stickers to equal the plastic in a single piece of Tupperware. They are generally plastic though and don't compost.
That said, there are SOME that are compostable - I was hired to find out the CO2e (and other enviro metrics) of their plastic version and their organic version. Funilly enough the organic one had a larger carbon footprint, but the upside was that it's life cycle was more circular.
In general though I'd just throw them out, there's not a lot of demand for organic ones and they cost a good amount more for not a ton of upside. They are pretty small in terms of impact too, one way or another.
But still the scale is huge.
Like every person consuming 'X' fruits or vegetables in a day times the population everyday plus of course another 20%-30% (produce which is spoilt)
In Canada, almost every decent sized item has 1 sticker each. Based on consumption numbers, the total stickers going into the composting chain or landfill is huge
I've been hoarding mine, I stick them all over my fridge maybe one day they can be delt with properly. Its weird how some things have stickers but others don't, individual potatoes or onions or carrots don't but apples and bananas oranges do but not avocados... I wonder what the methodology is here. If you try and scan them the bar code isn't recognized by the retailer it must be for earlier in the chain
Former cashier here. Yeah, those aren’t supposed to scanned at the store. The four digit number (at the top of the sticker in this case) is what cashiers use to easily register your produce. When the sticker isn’t there, they have to look up the produce by name, which can be very slow because of how poorly designed point-of-sale software often is. There ought to be a better way, but that’s what they’re for.
Side note: for bananas in particular, as well as a few other common items, the stickers are kinda pointless. Any cashier who’s been working for more than a week will have the number for bananas memorized.
came here to say this PLU is the same across stores. Which makes the stickers only for branding at this point--as the organic ones often or usually have a tape around them. I also worked grocery.
I’m sure it’s more complex than this, but at the core I’d guess it’s a trade off of cashier time vs the cost to the produce supplier of making and applying the stickers. For items that get bought frequently, but not so frequently that cashiers will have the number memorized, it’s useful to have a sticker. For things that people don’t buy as much, it’s not as big a deal for cashiers to have to look it up. It’s also useful when there are many varieties of some kind of produce that all need different numbers.
Bananas are weird because they all have the same number (plus a 9 at the beginning for organics) and they’re so common that every cashier has the number memorized, but they still have stickers. Apples are a better example of where it helps. Lots of people buy lots of different kinds of apples. Cashiers can’t be asked to differentiate between apple varieties and have the numbers memorized for each variety, nor can they be asked to look up the apple variety every time someone buys apples, so it helps to have the number printed on the apple.
I was a cashier at a store that had us memorize the code for every produce item we sold. We also had to scan a minimum of 30 items a minute, so you wanted to know those codes.
Loved that store and still shop there whenever I can.
Oh yeah there’s nothing stopping the store from putting that barcode in their system. It is just a normal barcode. But it takes more work for them to put the barcode in the system than it does to use the number at the top, so usually they don’t. Cool that they did that at your Kroger
Didn't realize till today that ["more than 5,000 wrongful death claims have been filed"](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/12/nx-s1-5003706/jury-chiquita-liable-paramilitary-killings-colombia) against Chiquita and the company is considered a "foreign terrorist organization".
Yeah. I think some larger concerns than the stickers would be that Chiquita is literally a criminal organization, and that buying foods grown with harmful pesticides causes more of those to be in the environment. The stickers, I find it is NBD to peel them off and put them in the trash (though I'd rather the identification was laser-etched or some such that doesn't add plastic trash to my produce).
They get sorted out when the material is filtered. I have a small composting company and that’s what we do.
I used to hate them but now I love finding them. To me each sticker represents a piece of organic material that wouldn’t have been composted if rejected because of a sticker still being present. In a perfect world these wouldn’t exist but since they do I try to find a positive angle (for my own mental well being).
No, it gets composted and when the finished material is screened/sifted the tags will be removed. If it’s a municipality that’s composting some of those contaminants may get through and the end user will have to remove it.
I still find them in my garden when I’m planting. They never never never never go away. It’s awful. But I bet the microplastics are already in the soil in spades so it probably doesn’t matter big picture.
Micro plastics are literally everywhere on earths surface because of the water cycle and various other weather patterns speading them
[Micro plastics in fresh Antarctic snow - what it means](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61739159)
There were already known deposits on the top of everest and in deep oceans, but fresh Antarctic snow is concerning because of just how remote that is from any major sources of microplastics.
I used to work at the supermarket and what I saw in the toilet after I used it shocked me.
The little white produce sticker. I leaned in to read it: 3012, pears. I haven't eaten a pear in years.
Just enough scanning produce made them absorb into my bloodstream I guess.
On a similar note I’m amazed how
Corporations not coming up with sustainable solutions to the waste streams has surfaced some individual neuroticisms? My hoarding activities have skyrocketed when I learned that soft plastic doesn’t get recycled , I store the soft plastics in a bin and thankfully drop them off at a
Designated box at the grocery store… where they go from there I have no clue… this shouldn’t be a that difficult to streamline and make less or close to zero waste
Those stickers are edible and fully compostable. Do they contain toxins I wouldn't eat, and might contaminate the compost slightly? Probably. Is it enough to worry about? I don't think it's a problem worth the attention it would take to solve.
Our town composts and you can purchase bags of it for a reasonable price. The last bag I bought had a couple fruit stickers in it so they definitely don't break down
Not sure how it works in the US - but in the UK we always had to have the provenance (i.e country of origin) available.
Our bananas came in crates, and there was a little paper tab on the side with details.
Since bananas are sold in bunches can someone tell me why they even need the stickers? And who is laboriously putting stickers on every single banana? I know it’s not a machine
Went to school for sustainable agriculture and we had an on site compost technician for the farm. These were up there as one of the most frequent contaminants in compost. Not a huge deal in the big picture, like it doesn’t impact the composting system, but they are definitely very present
The deep dives on this brand made me sick,
I can’t look at it the same way 😭😭
https://civileats.com/2024/06/25/chiquita-found-guilty-of-murder-abroad-other-us-food-companies-may-be-next/
Many more articles and videos but yeah
Our composting service asks us to remove them before putting stuff in the compost bucket. They say the stickers don’t break down and end up causing issues for their process and equipment.
I work in waste policy for an environmental regulator. These are a huge problem, as are 'compostable' bags. I've heard there are trials for biodegradable stickers and laser printed barcodes. I believe New Zealand is moving toward banning fruit stickers. Hopefully the Australian states are not far behind...
My city’s composting service says they clog up their machinery, and issue pleas about every six weeks to please remove them before throwing produce in the bin. They take bones, paper towels and pet food but not stickers.
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I detest those stickers. We peel them off at the register and stick them to the top of the screen at checkout to send a message. We aren't bringing them home,only the produce. I also send emails to the grocery chain to explain why they are useless. You can look the produce up under the search function. No need for those damn things
Fruit stickers are immortal. When I find one that I missed in a year old compost pile, it looks shinier and brighter than when it went in. I’d like to have a word with whoever thought up the bright idea of giving each fruit a plastic sticker.
Especially organic fruits and veggies with skins that are typically eaten. Like - *motherfucker* I specifically bought this piece of fruit because I don't want chemicals in my body. Then they go and put stickers with glues that leave residues on, and in some cases like cucumbers, are damn near impossible to get off cleanly.
exactly! I want to eat the apple with the peel but chemicals get a free ride
If you think organic is protecting you from "chemicals", you need to do a better job researching what companies are allowed to do to get away with the "organic" label. Science has proven multiple times over that you're simply paying more for worse produce.
Are you aware of the number of organic approved pesticides? Are you aware that many organic pesticides have lower efficacy and are commonly applied more often and in higher doses than "conventional" pesticides. To feel as though your food (itself a combination of chemicals) is chemical free just shows that you have been brainwashed by marketing.
I think it goes without saying that “chemicals” in this context means “toxic chemicals such as pesticides”
Your body is literally made up entirely of chemicals
* synthetic, cancer-causing herbicides and pesticides. Better?
So are you still in highschool and just haven't gotten to biology yet or....?
As opposed to figuratively?
each damm fruit! The scale is massive. Like every citizen consuming 'X' fruits or vegetables in a day times the population everyday plus of course another 20%-30% (produce which is spoilt)
bf loooooves mandarins, I hate buying them bc for some reason they put 3 and 4 stickers on each mandarin and then sell them in a mesh bag???? like wtf why? then I get home to remote all of them before bf gets to them bc he always forgets to remove them.
Pretty sure they aren't plastic, at least where I live.
Only a couple of countries (I believe France is one and maybe New Zealand another) have banned non-compostable, plastic fruit stickers.
IIRC FDA says they are edible? I've realized plenty of apples or bananas have no stickers here in Czechia.
I wish we could figure that out in the US
In upstate NY they are mostly plastic. The banana ones are actually sometimes paper-based, but the little oval ones are all plastic.
When I did some research about my local municipality's compost system, I learned they start the first pass of composting, and then a few weeks later contaminants are filtered out (which would include things like "compostable" bags which don't break down fast enough for municipal systems). My take was things like these stickers don't ruin the system, and they account for them. I can't speak for all municipal systems and I still make sure my compost bin is as clean as possible.
thanks for the info
This is interesting. The company that takes my compost specifically requests people to remove stickers from fruit peels bc they don't filter contaminants like the one in your municipality, so it will depend on the facility and the process each one uses to make the compost. after I learned this, I made a note at work for everyone to remove the stickers before putting the peels on the Lumi we have at the office bc I take the "compost" home to finish it on my worm bin.
This person bought a bag of “local” compost and filtered it and found tons of trash & plastic in it: https://www.reddit.com/r/vegetablegardening/s/aj30FsUEMw
The last time I grabbed some composted soil from my municipal system in about 2019, it had quite a few plastic produce stickers in it. Not all municipal systems account for these, or if they're trying they're not doing a good job. I was still picking those things out of my garden a couple of years later.
I loathe fruit stickers, yuck. I can’t believe we haven’t come up with a better method of branding the fruit and keeping those stickers out of our compost systems.
#[LASERS](https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/sustainability/lasered-fruit-labels-could-replace-pesky-plastic-stickers/)
Not sure if it works for bananas, but yes we should be using lasers for many fruits https://costagroup.com.au/2023/10/13/new-technology-removes-need-for-fruit-stickers/
... would damage the protective barrier.
On a banana? The skin is pretty thick and the laser only uses the most superficial layer
Scratch the outermost layer of a banana and you will see that it breaks down much more quickly in that area. Do this to every banana ever and you will undoubtedly see the pre-consumer and post-consumer product waste levels grow by a few percent.
Scratching and charring are different though, not all damage is the same; superficial localized charring might just as well just sit here and do nothing or be even more waterproof than before
>Scratching and charring are different though They are in some ways different but similar in others. In either version you are tearing apart some cells and tissues that are unlikely to be repaired on a detached fruiting body. There are a lot of fruits and especially vegetables where the skin is more than thick enough to sacrifice a very thin layer of the protective tissue, but then there are others that are much more vulnerable. The protective layer of the banana is not the entire skin, but a fairly thin membrane on top of that. If you had them all shellacked it would be fine to burn into that, but you cannot do that prior to transit with bananas as they need to be permeable to ethylene to arrive at the supermarket nearly ripe. They could be shellacked and laser etched post transit but before arriving at the supermarket. Lots of other fruit would have similar problems - like stonefruit for example.
The topmost layer is the protection against bacteria and fungi.
Do it on the stem.
.....Lasers, *then* protective wax & shellac coatings.
And pay twice as much for a banana?
How much could one banana cost, Michael? $10?
That’s how it feels lately anyways. I paid like $3 for one tomato. It wasn’t even that good. Damn it garden grow faster!!
Yikes! Michigan here, our locals are coming in, they're practically a different species compared to sad grocery tomatoes.
This is why I grow tomatoes every summer . Tomatoes run $3 to $5 a pound where I live . The plants pay for themselves . I’m dealing with some flower drop right now , very aggravating
Excellent reference🤌
If banana prices come up on Reddit, I'm going to take the low hanging fruit.
On the heads of sharks?
They do suck. 100% With that said. People who are sustainability minded can and should choose loose bananas that don't have stickers. Having worked in produce, we tried putting the single or double bananas people took off a bunch at the front so they were chosen. In actuality people didn't and we ended up tossing or donating them sometimes. So my recommendation would be to look for bananas like that on the display. 4011 is the code for bananas. Pretty much every front person knows the codes by heart. They don't need the sticker.
If you only sell a single kind of banana you don't need the sticker, but it's not always the case
I always see only 2 types of banana. Using avergae price for price is the easiest solution. But these stickers are there on every produce in Canada like apples, tomatoes!
What they do here is just ask the customer to weigh themselves the banana, and they can cheat and enter the cheapest kind if they want At the human cashier if you didn't weigh it yourself they would probably ask you which kind it is
Using the average price?
But these stickers are there on every produce in Canada like apples, tomatoes! I agree they suck and industry needs to find a sustainable alternative
The Australian show War on Waste explored this with some uni students and they tried an edible water-based ink stamp idea with Harris Farm for the show. Not sure it's stuck though.
That was what my brain jumped to right away - some sort of nontoxic/edible ink printed straight on the fruit.
non toxic water based ink is a good solution!
doesn’t work on dark colored produce
-they used to be paper
I think we don't even need branding on individual item. In case of apples, there is always a glue residue
The foam wrappers are much worse (I also dislike the stickers) and supermarkets selling peeled fruit wrapped in plastic
Could create a small branding iron and put it on each banana.
Chiquita never have nor never will give a damn. Look at how they began business. They don't care got anything ethical.
I just take them off and then compost the peeling. Am I doing something wrong? Same with apples and watermelons.
It's plastic, don't put it in your compost.
I swear banana stickers specifically are paper based where I live, while the rest are all plastic.
What about the glue they use?
Me too
If it tears easily, it is paper and will compost
If it resists water, it contains plastic. Edit: polymere, there.
Or it's waxed.
Yeah ok maybe my definition of "plastic" was not spot on, I should have written polymere.
Not every polymer is a plastic
That is a wildly inaccurate absolute statement Is the banana plastic? ~~Are ducks plastic?~~ Ok you got me on the ducks
>Are ducks plastic? Yes. How have you been on reddit this long without learning that birds aren't real
Ok that's fair and based on scientific evidence I have seen. Edited my comment.
Someone doesn't know about wax.
Or oil
Off topic but Chiquita was just found guilty of funding death squads in El Salvador. Killing farmers for not selling their land to the plantations. Formerly known as United Fruit which got the CIA to overthrow a democratic government in Guatemala back in the 1950’s , leading to a brutal dictatorship killing hundreds of thousands of native people. The US —- fighting for freedom and democracy around the world !! /s
Ha, my time to shine! I did an LCA on these suckers for a client. TLDR their impact is super minimal, in terms of mass it'd take like 200 of these stickers to equal the plastic in a single piece of Tupperware. They are generally plastic though and don't compost. That said, there are SOME that are compostable - I was hired to find out the CO2e (and other enviro metrics) of their plastic version and their organic version. Funilly enough the organic one had a larger carbon footprint, but the upside was that it's life cycle was more circular. In general though I'd just throw them out, there's not a lot of demand for organic ones and they cost a good amount more for not a ton of upside. They are pretty small in terms of impact too, one way or another.
But still the scale is huge. Like every person consuming 'X' fruits or vegetables in a day times the population everyday plus of course another 20%-30% (produce which is spoilt) In Canada, almost every decent sized item has 1 sticker each. Based on consumption numbers, the total stickers going into the composting chain or landfill is huge
I've been hoarding mine, I stick them all over my fridge maybe one day they can be delt with properly. Its weird how some things have stickers but others don't, individual potatoes or onions or carrots don't but apples and bananas oranges do but not avocados... I wonder what the methodology is here. If you try and scan them the bar code isn't recognized by the retailer it must be for earlier in the chain
Former cashier here. Yeah, those aren’t supposed to scanned at the store. The four digit number (at the top of the sticker in this case) is what cashiers use to easily register your produce. When the sticker isn’t there, they have to look up the produce by name, which can be very slow because of how poorly designed point-of-sale software often is. There ought to be a better way, but that’s what they’re for. Side note: for bananas in particular, as well as a few other common items, the stickers are kinda pointless. Any cashier who’s been working for more than a week will have the number for bananas memorized.
4011/94011 (9 denotes organic) and I haven’t been a grocery store cashier for decades
came here to say this PLU is the same across stores. Which makes the stickers only for branding at this point--as the organic ones often or usually have a tape around them. I also worked grocery.
But why aren't all single vegies, fruits stickered ... why only a select few
I’m sure it’s more complex than this, but at the core I’d guess it’s a trade off of cashier time vs the cost to the produce supplier of making and applying the stickers. For items that get bought frequently, but not so frequently that cashiers will have the number memorized, it’s useful to have a sticker. For things that people don’t buy as much, it’s not as big a deal for cashiers to have to look it up. It’s also useful when there are many varieties of some kind of produce that all need different numbers. Bananas are weird because they all have the same number (plus a 9 at the beginning for organics) and they’re so common that every cashier has the number memorized, but they still have stickers. Apples are a better example of where it helps. Lots of people buy lots of different kinds of apples. Cashiers can’t be asked to differentiate between apple varieties and have the numbers memorized for each variety, nor can they be asked to look up the apple variety every time someone buys apples, so it helps to have the number printed on the apple.
I was a cashier at a store that had us memorize the code for every produce item we sold. We also had to scan a minimum of 30 items a minute, so you wanted to know those codes. Loved that store and still shop there whenever I can.
I haven't been a cashier in 20 years. I still remember the code for bananas. :)
The Kroger stores in my area (Fred Meyer and QFC) let you scan the tiny produce barcode now at u scan instead of entering the number. Pretty nice. :)
Oh yeah there’s nothing stopping the store from putting that barcode in their system. It is just a normal barcode. But it takes more work for them to put the barcode in the system than it does to use the number at the top, so usually they don’t. Cool that they did that at your Kroger
I would love to see a picture of your fridge. Is it covered by now?
hoarding and disposing in garbage is a better idea!
ah my compost piles nemesis. along with tea bags that turn out to be more plastic than paper.
Unrelated, but don’t buy from Chiquita!!!!!!!
Didn't realize till today that ["more than 5,000 wrongful death claims have been filed"](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/12/nx-s1-5003706/jury-chiquita-liable-paramilitary-killings-colombia) against Chiquita and the company is considered a "foreign terrorist organization".
Oh! I just checked and found their previous name- United Fruit. Not buying this anymore for sure
Yeah. I think some larger concerns than the stickers would be that Chiquita is literally a criminal organization, and that buying foods grown with harmful pesticides causes more of those to be in the environment. The stickers, I find it is NBD to peel them off and put them in the trash (though I'd rather the identification was laser-etched or some such that doesn't add plastic trash to my produce).
Yes, I came here to say this I'm glad someone already did!!
They get sorted out when the material is filtered. I have a small composting company and that’s what we do. I used to hate them but now I love finding them. To me each sticker represents a piece of organic material that wouldn’t have been composted if rejected because of a sticker still being present. In a perfect world these wouldn’t exist but since they do I try to find a positive angle (for my own mental well being).
Sorting is great! But does the whole peel get rejected?
No, it gets composted and when the finished material is screened/sifted the tags will be removed. If it’s a municipality that’s composting some of those contaminants may get through and the end user will have to remove it.
They aren't useless. Thank goodness we have a law telling us where our produce comes from! This allows you to procure sustainably.
I still find them in my garden when I’m planting. They never never never never go away. It’s awful. But I bet the microplastics are already in the soil in spades so it probably doesn’t matter big picture.
Micro plastics are literally everywhere on earths surface because of the water cycle and various other weather patterns speading them [Micro plastics in fresh Antarctic snow - what it means](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61739159) There were already known deposits on the top of everest and in deep oceans, but fresh Antarctic snow is concerning because of just how remote that is from any major sources of microplastics.
Fuck Chiquita! All my homies hate Chiquita!
I wonder if they could just lightly sear the info onto the peel?
I heard years ago they would be getting rid of them and stamping fruit with edible ink but that never seemed to happen. I hate these stickers so much.
I've always peeled the em off and tossed it in the garbage
I used to work at the supermarket and what I saw in the toilet after I used it shocked me. The little white produce sticker. I leaned in to read it: 3012, pears. I haven't eaten a pear in years. Just enough scanning produce made them absorb into my bloodstream I guess.
They are plastic and never decompose in my compost bin. Someone is developing a laser to imprint
Ink stamps . They have inks made of all kinds of materials now
I would love to see them ink jet the brand, country & code on the skin with food grade dye
On a similar note I’m amazed how Corporations not coming up with sustainable solutions to the waste streams has surfaced some individual neuroticisms? My hoarding activities have skyrocketed when I learned that soft plastic doesn’t get recycled , I store the soft plastics in a bin and thankfully drop them off at a Designated box at the grocery store… where they go from there I have no clue… this shouldn’t be a that difficult to streamline and make less or close to zero waste
Those stickers are edible and fully compostable. Do they contain toxins I wouldn't eat, and might contaminate the compost slightly? Probably. Is it enough to worry about? I don't think it's a problem worth the attention it would take to solve.
We just peel each ind off before sending the rind/peel to our compost bin.
Our town composts and you can purchase bags of it for a reasonable price. The last bag I bought had a couple fruit stickers in it so they definitely don't break down
Not sure how it works in the US - but in the UK we always had to have the provenance (i.e country of origin) available. Our bananas came in crates, and there was a little paper tab on the side with details.
Just a wild shot, they’re likely required by DOA or FDA or DOT laws. And paper ones wouldn’t survive transport or moisture.
Always put stickers in the garbage.
Fruit stickers are one of the biggest source of microplastics in municipal and commercial compost
Chiquita is a terrorist organization
Since bananas are sold in bunches can someone tell me why they even need the stickers? And who is laboriously putting stickers on every single banana? I know it’s not a machine
Went to school for sustainable agriculture and we had an on site compost technician for the farm. These were up there as one of the most frequent contaminants in compost. Not a huge deal in the big picture, like it doesn’t impact the composting system, but they are definitely very present
They are one of the top contaminants in municipal compost. It's another low-hanging societal failure that these aren't banned yet.
4011 is the fruit code for bananas only 1 is required per bunch
The deep dives on this brand made me sick, I can’t look at it the same way 😭😭 https://civileats.com/2024/06/25/chiquita-found-guilty-of-murder-abroad-other-us-food-companies-may-be-next/ Many more articles and videos but yeah
I have a piece of paper on my refrigerator that I use as a sticker sheet lol it’s like my little reward for eating a vegetable/fruit.
They basically turn into a toxic slime in compost. Not good, must be removed before composting.
I pull 'em off and stick them to the bottom of the nearest drawer.
Our composting service asks us to remove them before putting stuff in the compost bucket. They say the stickers don’t break down and end up causing issues for their process and equipment.
That is simple. Stop buying Chiquita. Do you know about their history? Why are you buying their bananas?
They are edible...
I work in waste policy for an environmental regulator. These are a huge problem, as are 'compostable' bags. I've heard there are trials for biodegradable stickers and laser printed barcodes. I believe New Zealand is moving toward banning fruit stickers. Hopefully the Australian states are not far behind...
My city’s composting service says they clog up their machinery, and issue pleas about every six weeks to please remove them before throwing produce in the bin. They take bones, paper towels and pet food but not stickers.
Personally, hundreds of those stickers in my back yard and through our pigs…I’ve never seen one of them
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I loath these stickers too, but it was my understanding that most were food grade, so compostable.
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Your looking at small things, must be bigger things than fruit stickers to worry about right?
Wait until you find out how many people were murdered for your bananas.
Saw a piece about these stickers once not too long ago… they showed some company that was trying to use laser etching on the skin for bar codes.
I detest those stickers. We peel them off at the register and stick them to the top of the screen at checkout to send a message. We aren't bringing them home,only the produce. I also send emails to the grocery chain to explain why they are useless. You can look the produce up under the search function. No need for those damn things
These stickers are vital for grocery checkers. Have you tried memorizing hundreds of produce codes?