Grocery shopping with less plastic: what matters and what doesn't

The supermarket is where most household plastic comes in through the front door. It’s also where well-meaning shoppers get the worst advice. Swap everything to glass! Never buy a cucumber in film! Fill your own jars from the bulk bin! Some of that helps. Some of it makes things worse. A lot of it is beside the point.

This guide sorts the grocery-aisle choices into what the evidence supports, what it doesn’t, and where it’s honestly unclear. One theme runs through it: the food is almost always a bigger deal than the wrapper, so the best plastic decision is usually the one that also stops food going in the bin.

Start with food waste, not the wrapper

The packaging industry’s favourite defence is that plastic keeps food fresh, so removing it causes waste. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t, and the best test we found of the question came from WRAP, the UK waste charity.

WRAP’s lab stored five commonly wasted items (apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumbers and potatoes) packaged and loose, at different temperatures, and had trained assessors judge when they deteriorated. Of 10 packaged-versus-loose comparisons, eight showed no detectable difference in shelf life. That included the cucumber: at neither temperature did the shrink wrap make it last longer. Packaging helped in two cases, bananas at room temperature (1.8 days longer) and broccoli in a cold fridge (7 days longer). WRAP also notes earlier research that most UK shoppers take bananas out of their bag at home anyway.

The bigger effect was quantity. Pre-packed produce makes you buy the pack size, not the amount you need. WRAP estimated that if apples, bananas and potatoes were all sold loose, UK households could waste 60,000 tonnes less food and use 8,800 tonnes less plastic a year. Its other big finding cost nothing: produce kept in a fridge at 4°C lasted at least three times as long as at room temperature for the three items tested that way (apples, broccoli and potatoes).

Caveats: five items, UK supply chains, and a lab rather than real homes. For delicate produce like berries, packaging may still earn its keep. But “the plastic keeps it fresh” deserves a “show me” rather than a nod.

What this means at the shop: buy loose when you can, buy the amount you’ll eat, and keep produce that likes the cold in a fridge set to 5°C or below.

Produce bags

The thin bags on the roll by the onions are among the least-loved plastic in the shop and among the easiest to skip. Most loose produce doesn’t need a bag at all. Bananas, onions, citrus, avocados and squash can go straight in the basket. Bag the small and loose things (beans, mushrooms, grapes) and reuse those bags.

The law is slowly catching up. California, which now bans all plastic film checkout bags, has since 2025 also limited stores’ pre-checkout produce bags to recycled paper or compostable ones meeting state standards. The EU’s packaging regulation goes further from 1 January 2030: it bans single-use plastic packaging for pre-packed fresh fruit and vegetables under 1.5 kg, and very lightweight plastic bags, except where they’re needed for hygiene or to stop loose food being wasted. Countries can carve out exemptions where packaging demonstrably prevents water loss, spoilage or damage, so watch for how wide those turn out to be.

Two cautions about the replacements:

• Mesh “reusable produce bags” are often polyester. That’s plastic, and synthetic textiles shed fibres in the wash; our product standard excludes textiles that are more than 5% synthetic. A cotton bag or a paper bag you reuse avoids that.
• Don’t buy a drawer of new bags. A new reusable bag starts with a footprint to pay off, and cotton takes a lot of uses to break even. Our budget guide has the numbers. Use the bags you already have until they fall apart.

One small thing nobody thinks about: opening plastic packaging makes microplastics. Australian researchers found that cutting, tearing or twisting open plastic bags, containers and caps released about 0.46 to 250 microplastics per centimetre opened, depending on the plastic and how it was opened. It’s a small, lab-measured source, but it’s another point for loose food.

Glass vs plastic: where the life-cycle evidence surprises people

This is the section where we disappoint the jar enthusiasts.

Life-cycle assessments (LCAs) add up a product’s environmental impacts from raw material to disposal: energy, emissions, water, resource use. A 2025 systematic review of 53 LCAs published between 2019 and 2023 compared plastic packaging with the alternatives. Where single-use glass was compared with single-use plastic, the result favoured plastic in all but two of the 12 studies, and those two were a draw. The reason is weight. For the same volume of food or drink, glass is much heavier, which costs energy to make and to truck around.

Refillable glass is a different story, but not an automatic win. The review found it depends on four things: how many times the glass is reused, what happens to the plastic at the end of its life, how much recycled plastic is in the bottle, and how far the bottles travel. One study it summarised found a glass milk bottle used eight times had lower impacts than a virgin PET bottle in only two impact categories, and in four after 30 uses. Short supply chains and high reuse rates are what make glass pay off.

So why do we still prefer glass and steel? Because LCAs mostly measure carbon, energy and resources, and they mostly leave out the two problems this site is about. The review itself notes that littering is generally not included in LCAs because there’s no agreed method. In the one bottle study that tried, the returnable glass bottle’s littering risk was 24% of the PET bottle’s. And LCAs don’t count chemicals moving from packaging into food. That’s where the case against plastic packaging lives, especially for hot, fatty or acidic food.

The honest translation:

Choice	What the evidence says
Single-use glass jar instead of a plastic tub	Usually worse for carbon. Better if you’ll keep and reuse the jar for years.
Refillable glass (milk round, deposit bottles)	Can beat plastic, if it’s reused many times and doesn’t travel far.
Plastic packaging you then store and heat food in	The real exposure risk. Decant into glass or steel at home.
Cans instead of plastic	Mixed on footprint; most cans have a plastic lining. See our BPA explainer.
Bottled water in any material	Skip it where your tap is safe. See bottled water.

In short: buy glass when you’ll reuse it, not as a one-way swap for its own sake. A pasta sauce jar that becomes your lunch container for five years is a good deal. A glass bottle that goes straight in the recycling after one use usually isn’t, on carbon at least.

Packaging choices that matter, and ones that don’t

Matters more:

• Buying the right amount. WRAP found the benefit of letting people buy the right amount was much greater than any influence of packaging on shelf life.
• Not heating or storing food in packaging plastic. Takeout tubs, cling film on cheese and plastic trays in the oven are where chemicals move. See our food storage guide and microwaving guide.
• Fewer canned foods if bisphenols worry you, for the reasons in our BPA explainer.
• Refill and deposit systems where they exist, because reuse at scale is what beats single-use in the life-cycle studies.

Matters less than you’d think:

• Which single-use material wraps dry goods. We found no evidence that a plastic pasta bag versus a cardboard box with a plastic window makes a meaningful difference to you, and the life-cycle results for single-use materials are mixed. Whether you eat the pasta matters more.
• “Recyclable” logos. They tell you little about whether the item gets recycled. See what the labels really mean.
• “Compostable” packaging unless you have an industrial composter that takes it. See our compostables explainer.

Bulk bins and refill shops

Bulk bins and refill shops let you buy exactly the amount you want in your own container, which ticks both the packaging box and the food-waste box. That’s the logic. The evidence is thinner than the enthusiasm: we couldn’t find a peer-reviewed life-cycle study or hygiene study of grocery bulk bins or refill shops. So this section is mostly about rules and common sense.

Hygiene. In the US, the FDA’s model Food Code requires self-service ready-to-eat food to come with suitable utensils or dispensers and staff monitoring. Gravity dispensers and scoops on chains are better than open bins with a shared scoop sitting in the food.

Allergies. The 2022 Food Code added a requirement that bulk food sold for self-dispensing be labelled with its major allergens in plain view. Labelling doesn’t prevent cross-contact, though: if someone moves a scoop from the peanuts to the oats, the label won’t know. If you have a serious food allergy, packaged food from a controlled line is the safer choice, and nobody should feel guilty about that.

Your own containers. In the EU, shops that offer refill must tell you which containers you can use, the hygiene rules and your own responsibilities. They can refuse a container they consider unhygienic, and they carry no liability for problems caused by it. From 2030, stores over 400 m² must try to give 10% of their sales area to refill stations. In the US, it’s down to the store and local health rules; ask at customer service, and get the container weighed (“tared”) before you fill it.

Price. Bulk is sometimes cheaper and sometimes a premium “zero waste” markup. A 2026 Michigan State study of 57 matched products found that alternatives to flexible plastic packaging cost more per weight on average, though the gap varied a lot. If plastic-free shopping costs you more, that’s a pricing and policy failure, not a personal one. Our budget guide covers who gets left out.

Receipts: the plastic-adjacent problem at the till

Thermal receipt paper isn’t plastic, but it carries one of plastic’s best-known chemicals. The developer that makes the print appear was long BPA, which sits loose on the surface and rubs off on your fingers. The exposure evidence, the EU’s 2020 ban on BPA in thermal paper and the hand-sanitizer problem are all in our BPA explainer, so we won’t repeat them here.

The newer news is what replaced it. In 571 US receipts collected in 2022, BPS was the developer in 85%, Pergafast 201 in 12% and BPA in only 1%. BPA’s decline was mostly a swap to its chemical cousin. National chains were more likely than local shops to have moved to non-bisphenol paper.

There is one partly reassuring finding. In lab tests on donated human skin, about 25% of applied BPA was absorbed over 24 hours, compared with 0.4% of BPS, and Pergafast 201 was below the level the lab could measure. That’s skin in a lab dish, not people, and lower absorption doesn’t make BPS harmless: our BPA explainer covers why “BPA-free” isn’t the same as safe.

What helps:

• Say no to the receipt, or ask for it by email or in the app.
• If you take one, don’t crumple it in your hand, and don’t handle it right after hand sanitizer or before eating.
• Check your local rules before recycling receipts. Receipt chemicals contaminate paper recycling streams. Follow what your local collection service says about receipts.
• If you work a till, the risk is mostly yours, not the shopper’s. Ask your employer about phenol-free paper and gloves.

What to do, ranked by evidence

1. Buy the amount you’ll eat, loose where possible (good evidence). WRAP’s tests found plastic often doesn’t extend shelf life, and buying the right amount cuts both food and packaging waste.

2. Keep the cold-loving produce in a fridge at 5°C or below (good evidence). It extended shelf life far more than any wrapper did in the same tests. It’s free.

3. Don’t heat or store food in its packaging plastic (good evidence that heat and fat increase migration). Decant into glass or steel at home. That’s where your exposure actually comes from, not from the walk home.

4. Reuse what you have: jars, bags, boxes (good logic, supported by life-cycle studies). Reuse is what makes glass and cotton pay off. Single-use glass isn’t a green upgrade.

5. Skip the receipt (moderate evidence of exposure, mainly for cashiers). Ask for email receipts and don’t handle thermal paper with sanitizer-damp hands.

6. Use bulk and refill where it suits you (weak direct evidence; sensible). Fine if it’s affordable and you don’t have a serious food allergy. Not worth a special car trip.

7. Push for systems, not swaps (strong evidence that this is where the gains are). Loose produce by default, deposit-return bottles, refill stations and honest packaging rules beat any one shopper’s tote bag collection. Ask your supermarket to sell more produce loose and to stop putting date labels on uncut fruit and veg, which WRAP found drives perfectly edible food into the bin.

The packaging question is real, but it’s smaller than the food question, and it’s mostly answered upstream. Buy what you’ll eat, store it well, keep hot food away from plastic, and save your energy for the shop manager, not the cucumber.

More in our kitchen section.