We’ve got your bag
Turning plastic into the most sustainable solution for grocery delivery
Imagine placing your first order at Picnic. They boast a fully-electric delivery fleet, locally sourced products, and smart delivery routes. Pretty sustainable, right? Then you open the door to the friendly Runner and notice something that doesn’t seem to sit quite right in this pretty green picture. What’s up with all these plastic bags?
The answer might surprise you: these ostensibly objectionable containers are actually the most efficient and sustainable solution for safely getting groceries to your kitchen. And this year we’ve made it even better by creating a completely closed loop for the recycling of our plastic bags. Here’s how we did it, and why we’re sticking to plastic.
Taking control
When we do something at Picnic, we prefer to do it ourselves. It gives us the most control and ensures we can live up to our sustainability and efficiency standards. This wasn’t always the case with the recycling of our plastic bags. Up until recently, this was done by a recycling partner who repurposed our bags into other plastic products. A satisfying solution, but we wouldn’t be Picnic if we didn’t go the extra mile. So, as we have done many times, we decided to take matters into our own hands.
Closing the loop
We got down to the nitty-gritty of the issue and discovered the real problem with plastic. It doesn’t degrade. So, if we can minimize waste, plastic is actually an affordable, strong, and clean material. Especially since the production and transport of plastic are actually more sustainable than that of cotton or cardboard containers. Let’s get to it.
We created a completely closed loop with the help of our customers. Whenever they receive a Picnic order at their door, they’re encouraged to hand in their plastic bags with the Runner. We take these bags and directly repurpose them into new bags. No extra shipping to third parties, and no waste of resources. We also added a deposit to the bags, which customers get back when returning the bags to the Runner. They clean up clutter, while we get the materials to create new bags. Win-win. By taking control of this process we know exactly what happens to the plastic and fewer raw materials are needed for recycling.
Other materials
Plastic often (and for good reason) gets a bad rap, and one of the questions our customers ask the most is ‘Why don’t you use another material instead of plastic bags?’. Our choice for plastic was a conscious one since it fits our use case best, and other materials bring their own problems like:
Paper bags
They may seem sustainable, but producing paper bags requires large amounts of land, material, and resources. They are also barely reusable, while we can recycle our plastic bags almost endlessly. Finally, paper bags are not strong enough to hold heavy groceries, and of course, we want those to arrive in your kitchen in one piece.
Cotton bags
Compared to plastic, the production of cotton is so harmful to the environment that it would only have a positive effect after being reused more than 100 times. It is not responsible for reusing shopping bags so often — hygiene and food safety are far too important for that. We could only reuse a cotton bag a maximum of 10 to 15 times and so that option dropped out quickly.
Plastic crates
Some other services deliver the groceries to their customers directly in crates. This an option we’ve considered as well, but in the end, we still chose plastic bags. Using these, we can combine multiple orders in one crate, and we don’t end up driving around with half-empty crates, which is neither efficient nor sustainable. Moreover, the production of hard PPP plastic for new crates and the cleaning of existing crates is quite costly and requires many other resources. Finally, to make sure the crates return to us, we’d have to ask for a large deposit, making groceries at Picnic more expensive.
Going forward
Revisiting our bags once again for us underlined the importance of staying critical of everything we do and keep looking for improvements. Even where we thought we’d already figured it out. That being said, we’ve got many exciting things cooking — stay tuned!
Copy by Matteo Sabbatini
