Let’s talk about plastic pollution and how to live more zero-waste

U.S. supermarkets have a plastic problem. 

When you go into a typical supermarket, you’re quickly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of food packaging. 

Aisles and aisles of shelves full of plastic in hundreds of colors, each package trying to grab your attention and take your money. Sustainability circles often talk about reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, citing the need for public transit and green energy. But plastic is derived from oil, and single-use plastic food packaging is another contributor to the fossil fuel crisis. 

All the packaging in your typical grocery store is just soon-to-be-trash. And even worse, most of the products inside are not even good for your health. Trash food in trash packaging. 

Via Roman Mikhailiuk

Americans create a ton of trash. 

In fact, we threw away over 294 million tons of municipal waste in 2018 alone. This is equal to the weight of 49 million adult African elephants (which is over 118 times the real amount of African elephants that exist today). Or it’s nearly 72 times the weight of the heaviest building on Earth, the Palace of the Parliament in Romania. 

In 2018, over 82 million tons of this municipal waste came from plastic food packaging. That would be 13.6 million elephants, or 20 of the world’s heaviest buildings. Just from food packaging in the US alone. 

Packaging, mostly for food, is also the single largest contributor to national plastic waste, only 13% of which gets recycled. In fact, over 60% of the plastic that is produced globally is used for food – from groceries to takeout. While this has made food more convenient, it also means that we’re using tons of resources for packaging that is only used once and thrown away where it will pollute the Earth for centuries. 

Knowing this, it’s hard to go into your typical supermarket and see what’s on the shelves as anything other than trash. 

The pandemic in 2020 made our food packaging waste problem even worse, as many places scrapped bring-your-own container policies and bulk refill bins. Plastic waste increased by 30% that year. While some places have moved to re-adopt reusables, many others have kept the bans in place. 

Plastic recycling is a myth. 

Did you know that most plastic never gets recycled? In the U.S., only 9% of plastic ever gets recycled. This is much lower than the recycling rates for glass at 33% (which can and should be much higher), metal at 70%, and paper which has rates between 43% and 96% depending on the kind of paper product. 

In fact, much of the plastic we create isn’t even recyclable. While all plastic products have the 3 arrows and a number on them, this doesn’t indicate recycleability, just the type of plastic it is. Only plastics 1, 2, 4, and 5 can be recycled, plastics 3, 6, and 7 cannot be. And just because something can be recycled doesn’t mean that it is. 

Plastic quality degrades as it’s recycled, so you can’t typically make the same product over and over again. For example plastic bottles can’t be recycled into more plastic bottles, but they can be recycled into plastic thread for items made out of synthetic materials like polyester. 

Contrast this with products like aluminum and glass that can be recycled infinitely without losing quality. 

It would be great if the plastic we create would get recycled. But to do this we would need more consumer demand for recycled plastic, and we would need a lot more recycling infrastructure. Even that comes with a high environmental cost of toxins and pollutants. And plastic recycling facilities often create injustice as they’re located near poor communities and places with high BIPOC populations.

Eating out of plastic impacts our health. 

When we heat things in plastic, eat out of plastic, cut things on plastic cutting boards, or even wash clothes made of plastic-based fibers, we release microplastics. These end up in our bodies, soils, and waterways. Microplastics in soil can effect plant growth, in water they wind up in fish that we then eat, and in our bodies scientists are just starting to uncover the serious health risks they pose. 

What we are starting to learn is that microplastics are linked to tons of health risks. They can increase risk for certain types of cancers, harm reproductive systems, and cause respiratory and digestive issues. The worst part is that no one is immune. Microplastics have been found in our brains, blood, and even the placenta of unborn babies. 

But our food doesn’t need to come wrapped in plastic. 

Humans existed and ate food for centuries without the need for single use plastics. This whole mess is a relatively recent development for society, and one that we have the power to change still. 

Plastics gave us convenience, and sometimes a way to make food last longer. (This also means that we needed to engineer preservatives and chemicals so that the food wouldn’t be rotten by the time it made it to your plates.)

We can grab quick snacks, ready-made meals, single servings in multi-packs. But the cost of that instant convenience is that our planet is polluted with billions of tons of plastic trash that aren’t going anywhere. 

What if you could have the convenience of packaging, without the environmental cost of landfills and generations of plastic waste? We think it’s entirely possible, and much more enjoyable. 

Little actions add up. 

While it would be great to see structural changes that limit new plastic production, or to see the biggest plastic polluters take voluntary actions to change their contributions to waste, there’s a lot of money blocking progress in those areas. 

So until then, we all have to take actions and know that collectively, we have an impact that can’t be ignored. Here are some small, accessible actions that can help anyone make a dent in the problem of plastics: 

• Shop at your local farmer’s market and learn how to cook with seasonal veggies! It’s much easier to get nutritious produce without single-use plastics. 
• Whenever there’s an option at the store, opt for food in cardboard, metal, or glass over plastic. All have higher recycling rates, and can be reused in many creative ways. 
• Skip the plastic produce bags and plastic bags at checkout! Over 100 billion plastic bags are used each year in US supermarkets, and the vast majority are never recycled. Use cloth produce bags, and bring your own reusable shopping totes. Or you can just toss produce straight in your cart, it should get washed before you eat it anyway. 
• Pay for a specialty plastics recycling service like Ridwell to ensure the plastics you can’t avoid get second life. 
• Skip takeout whenever you can! Dine in at restaurants and bring your own container for leftovers, or cook at home to avoid plastic containers, utensils, and bags. 
• Bring your reusable mug to local coffee shops who are more likely to encourage bring-your-own-cup customers than large chains. 
• Switch to reusable silicone or beeswax food wraps in your home and ditch single-use baggies and clingwrap. Use up what you have, then opt for a sustainable swap when you can. 
• If you live in the Front Range, start shopping Nude!

The future of food is Nude. 

Or at least, we sure hope so. We started Nude Foods Market to give people the convenient grocery shopping experiences they are used to, without the plastic. 

We’re not 100% perfect, but we try our absolute best to be as plastic-free as possible. We buy everything in bulk, or source directly from local vendors, then portion products into reusable glass jars to stock on our shelves.

From our founding in 2020 to when we launched our second location in 2024, we’d already avoided over 1.5 million pieces of single use plastic from needing to be created! All with just one store! Imagine the impact our community of Nude Foodies will have as we expand.  

The plastic crisis has solutions. 

There are many voices out there who would have you believe that solving plastics is impossible, but it’s not. They serve their purpose for items we can’t make out of any other material, like some medical equipment. But we do not need plastics in every area of life, especially food. 

Take action, even if it feels small. Encourage a friend to take action. And keep it up! It will create ripple effects and soon, an overwhelming problem won’t seem so overwhelming. 

 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

– Margaret Meade

What is the food system and how can we make it sustainable?

This is the first part of our educational series on sustainability in food. If you want to get all the updates, sign up here.

For all of human history, we’ve had to eat. But how we get food onto our tables now looks more different than it ever has before, and that’s not really a good thing.

In this post, we’re going to lay out all the ways that our food system is broken, but don’t worry! As we dive deeper in this series, we will talk about solutions and explore the ways a sustainable food system is already emerging, so be sure to follow along.

You can watch videos of each topic on Nude Food’s YouTube, catch snippets on Instagram or Tiktok, or get bite-sized newsletters sent straight to your inbox. 

What is a food system?

This is a term that covers everything from growing food, to packaging and distributing it, to eating it. A food system can be global or local, depending on the scale you’re looking at.

Our food system currently is globalized and incredibly complex. We source food from all around the world, and several industries are involved to get food from where it’s grown to your plate. On one hand, this is delicious. It’s nice to have mangos in cold climates, or fresh produce year round. But on the other hand, this system creates a loooot of problems.

 

Via Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

How did we get here?

Before the development of agriculture, humans spent about 20 hours per week hunting and foraging for food. After agriculture and farming became the main food source, humans spent 30+ hours per week tending to fields. In the past few hundred years, as societies diversified their skillsets, most humans spent a lot of their income on food. Even our parents and grandparents in 1950-1960 were spending more on food as a proportion of their income compared to the early 2000s.

(Would that hold up today, in 2025? Maybe not – but that is likely because of corporate greed in pricing food, not that it is more expensive to produce.)

The truth is that the real cost of food is hidden. Many things contribute to this, including: agricultural subsidies, labor exploitation of agricultural workers, a lack of economic penalty for environmental harm, industrialization, swapping out natural ingredients for artificial ones… the list could go on.

How does our current food system compare to the past?

The Earth is cyclical. We have seasons, carbon cycles, water cycles, birth and death cycles, and for most of human history we aligned food production to these natural rhythms.

In the past, we grew regionally specific foods that were cultivated to thrive in those regions. What wasn’t eaten was fed to livestock or composted, their manure would add nutrients back into the soil, after the growing seasons the dying plants would break down and feed the earth, and we relied on these cycles of nature to help us grow food.

We also ate seasonally. Humans ate a plant-forward diet during the warm months, and used storage crops like potatoes, squash, and grains as well as meats throughout the colder months.

But now we’ve lost touch with all of that. We can get any food at any time – which means it’s not very fresh and likely has traveled halfway across the world to get to your plate. Our food production systems are linear and extractive.

Via Amelia Bates on Unsplash

Rather than working with the cycles of the Earth, we’ve completely ignored most of them.

Nature could provide all the nutrients the soil needs, but we’ve upended the cycle of organic matter decomposition that would add nutrients back. We rip plants out of the ground after harvest and leave soil bare, and opt for chemicals rather than compost.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential for plants to grow. We’ve found ways to create them synthetically, and we spray them as fertilizers on our crops. But studies have shown that nearly 80% of the fertilizers we apply are lost due to runoff, soil erosion, and more. When excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus make it to our waterways, they cause algae blooms that suck up all the oxygen in the water and create dead zones. These are becoming more common all across the world.

Couple that with the massive amounts of pesticides we use that are directly leading to the loss of our pollinator and insect populations, including honey bees and butterflies, and you start to realize that what we’re using to grow food is also really good at killing things – including us.

Herbicides and pesticides used in agriculture are known to cause horrible health effects in humans. Glyphosate, a chemical found in the herbicide RoundUp, is a carcinogen and a recent study found that it can increase risk of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma by 41%. Pesticide exposure can cause many negative health outcomes, including short-term symptoms, cancer, chronic illnesses, and negative reproductive and nervous system effects.

It might make you wonder, why are we putting that on our food?? 

Via Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network

Agriculture, the Food System, and Climate Change

The environmental harm our food system does hasn’t had a price tag attached. But maybe it should. In the US, agriculture contributes 11% of our greenhouse gas emissions, including tons of methane from cattle production which is has a vastly higher warming effect than carbon. When we put food scraps in the landfill, they also create methane as they slowly break down without oxygen.

Conventional agriculture is carbon-intensive. It requires heavy gas-powered machinery, and food is transported all over the country and/or the world before making it to your plate.

Additionally, soil is a carbon sink – plants take in carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. But most farms till, which rips up the soil and releases all that stored carbon back into the atmosphere. And it degrades the quality of soils, which leads to the need for chemical fertilizers. Weeds also love degraded soils, leading to the use of herbicides.

As you can see, when we work outside of the Earth’s natural cycles it causes problems and our man-made solutions often lead to more problems.

The food system and our health

What we eat has a massive effect on our health and communities – we see this all over the U.S. People who primarily eat processed, chemical-laden foods have worse health outcomes than those who have access to and eat healthy, fresh, nutrient-dense foods.

Food access is a structural issue that is also built into our food system. Developing cities or towns so that they lack grocery stores, or lack stores that sell organic healthy food, is a choice.

Because so many people don’t have easy access to food that is nourishing for them, our healthcare costs are enormous. It’s no secret that Americans spend more on healthcare than any other developed country. We foot the bill for our broken food system at the doctors office, rather than the grocery store. 

And unfortunately, because we’ve depleted our soil of nutrients, much of the produce on grocery store shelves today is considerably less nutrient-dense than what our grandparents were eating. Unless you’re buying produce from a local farm that prioritizes soil health, you’re probably not getting the level of nutrients from produce that our bodies need.

From field to grocery store

Now let’s take a look at American grocery stores. Nearly every product in it comes packaged in plastic which isn’t good for our health. The plastic waste from our groceries stays in our environment forever, slowly breaking down into microplastics that build up in soil and water. And most grocery products have a global footprint. 

Via Nico Smit on Unsplash

For example, if you buy a snack pack of pears it might say “grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand” and you’re holding it in a U.S. grocery aisle.

Or a product like chicken might be farmed in the U.S., but sent to China to be processed and packaged, and then sent back here to be sold.

Most of our produce comes from California, Mexico, or South America, and is flown or shipped to grocery stores so that by the time it gets to you, it really shouldn’t be considered “fresh”. 

We’ve grown used to convenience, but at what cost? Much of the food that travels the world before it gets to your plate could be grown, for a significant part of the year, in our own regions. Humans survived for eons on the food grown in their areas.

To acommodate the industrialization of food, we’ve seen the rise of megafarms. In the past 100 years, we’ve gone from 6.8 million farms in the US, to now just 1.8 million. This is due to many things, but farm consolidation and agribusiness taking over the majority of the land in production is a huge factor. 

This is a huge issue, because it means that any shock to the system can be catastrophic. 

A centralized, globalized food system is less resilient

The vast majority of our country’s eggs come from a few centralized factory farms rather than tons of small local ones. So in January when the bird flu hit, people were seeing empty egg sections in grocery stores from coast to coast.

Industrial agriculture is a key player in this crisis too. When animals, like chickens, are packed so tightly in confined spaces like they are in factory farms, disease spreads rapidly. Local farms with plenty of pasture for their chickens didn’t see outbreaks of the bird flu. 

When we concentrate most of our food production in the hands of a few massive agribusinesses, we also set ourselves up for crisis as climate disasters become more common. Tornadoes and flooding across the corn or grain belt could decimate our supply of those products and send huge ripple effects through the food supply chain. We’ve already started to see this.

How can we fix this broken food system?

As an individual, you can only do so much until we have larger scale solutions. At Nude Foods, we’re actively building a new system. We research and vet every product for health and sustainability, carry almost entirely organic products, prioritize local sourcing, and seek out regenerative products. Eating should be easy, so we exist to make sure it is easy AND good for you and the planet.

But if you don’t have a Nude Foods near you, there are still many actions you can take to help create a better food system. 

• Buy locally from sustainable farms whenever you can
• Buy organic products as much as possible
• Skip as much plastic as possible – take your fruits and veg “naked”, opt for groceries in cardboard, metal, or glass when you have a choice, or take it a step further and shop at bulk foods stores with your own containers
• Support brands championing regenerative agriculture, like Patagonia Provisions snacks and Alexandre Family Farms dairy products
• Eat less beef, and when you do, buy local and/or regenerative beef

Our goal is to transform the food system.

It’s completely possible to feed the planet AND grow food in a way that regenerates the earth. It takes changes – from industry, which is what we’re focused on shifting, all the way to individual choices of where we shop and what we buy. But we think a better system is fully possible, and necessary. 

Stick around for more! Over the coming weeks we will be deep diving into other areas of the food system and exploring all the solutions that exist. 

You can watch videos of each topic on Nude Food’s YouTube, catch snippets on Instagram or Tiktok, or get bite-sized newsletters sent straight to your inbox.