Come together
Elevate your individual action into collective action, and increase your impact. You have already embraced zero waste and are avoiding single use plastics wherever you can but you are sick of seeing plastic all over supermarket shelves, ending up in our streets, parks, rivers and beaches. You know that to achieve wide scale change we need to make producers and decision makers listen and act. But to make them listen – we need to come together to make our individual actions and voices heard.
Be the first to set up a Sick of Plastic group in your local area, or join one already active. If you have a local Tidy Towns or a clean up crew, why not collaborate and come together!
Supermarket audit
Select the supermarket you want to target. Do a supermarket audit to find out how they are performing on plastic packaging and find out what their plans are to act on plastic.
Shop and Drop
Organise a day of action at your chosen supermarket, gather your troops and choose your date.
Create awareness about your action a few weeks beforehand so more people can take part by
posting the Shop and Drop poster around your local area.
The action is simple, when you are doing your grocery shop leave your plastic packaging behind after
checkout to show supermarkets that they need to take action and eliminate unnecessary plastic
packaging. Simply remove the plastic packaging from your broccoli, aubergine, etc and leave it in the
bin provided.
By notifying your supermarket manager in advance they can provide a designated area for leaving
plastic packaging after checkout, so customers are not causing delays in queues or disrupting staff.
Nominate a few volunteers to collect petition signatures and inform the public about the campaign.
Supermarket Pledge
Present your supermarket audit to your supermarket manager so they can see where they can make
improvements. Remind them how many people took part in the day of action and that their customers
want them to act..
These are what we are asking supermarkets to do in our petition:
1. Offer more items without packaging, such as fruit and vegetables (without plastic trays,
wrapping and nets).
2. Make their own-brand packaging easily compostable or recyclable, and use less plastic.
3. Demand, through their purchasing power, that other brands they carry have easily
compostable or recyclable packaging, and use less plastic.
4. Blaze a trail in Ireland by implementing a plastic free aisle, as has been done in the
Netherlands.
5. Provide items in bulk, where possible, to reduce packaging.
6. Allow shoppers use their own containers to buy dried goods, buying only what they need.
Ask your supermarket to make the pledge to Break Free From Plastic and mark your supermarket’s
pledge on the map.
Keep up the pressure and gather more troops
Keep an eye on your supermarket to make sure they keep their promise to break free from plastic.
Move on to the next supermarket of choice, and repeat above steps.