Bonus Supermarket Basket Comparison

We compared the average packaging and pricing of a sample basket across the five main Irish supermarkets with a Zero-waste shopping, the results are shocking.

Packaging-free shopping cut waste by 65% - no fancy innovation needed, solutions are already there.

This year’s NRBS included a new deep dive into the biggest contributors to household packaging waste: supermarkets. In a focused study, we tracked the packaging footprint of a typical weekly shop for a two-person household across five major supermarket chains (Supervalu, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi and Dunnes Stores). The results were striking! For a list of just 30 common grocery items, supermarkets generated:

• An average of 40 packaging pieces,
• 67% made from plastic materials (soft plastics, hard plastics, nets, tetrapaks and polyethylene).

In contrast, when we sourced the same items from zero-waste or low-packaging retailers, the packaging count dropped by 65%, to just 14 items.

By switching to less-packaged alternatives, individuals could cut their waste by 744 items of packaging per person each year. Scaled nationally, that’s a potential 4 billion less packaging needing waste management. And that’s with solutions already on the market. We could achieve even more if our food distribution systems were truly designed with reduction and reuse at their core.

Prices: although the zero-waste shopping was 19% more expensive than the average price across the five supermarkets (€63), it proved to be the same price as the shopping carried out in SuperValu (€75). A major factor to consider being that 40% of the packaging free shop was organic products, compared to 0% for the supermarkets.‍

Through the purchase of a sample basket in each of these retail shops, we analysed how much packaging waste a typical grocery basket generates.

We also examined how these compare to a zero waste basket, sourced through alternatives like refill and packaging-free shops. This study dives into the details of how supermarkets are addicted to plastic and packaging and what a more circular approach to grocery shopping could look like