Why new plastic expiry date stickers have started to appear on supermarket products
Shoppers have started to notice new expiry date stickers being placed on some popular items, and there's a good reason
When you're doing your supermarket shop, it's likely that there's two major things you take into account when buying something - price and expiry date.
But while you take the actual product's expiration date into consideration, what you probably don't think about, is when its packaging will expire.
It may sound daft, but it can be easy to forget that food packaging can last for hundreds of years, especially when it's single-use plastic.
In a bid to raise public awareness about the astonishing lifespan of some single-use plastics, two budding entrepreneurs have designed plastic expiry date stickers, and now they have started to appear on some supermarket items in the UK.
Two advertising creatives, Gagandeep Jhuti and Joe Foale-Groves, created Plastic Expiry Date stickers for single-use meal deal packaging, in a bid to help bring awareness to consumers about how their daily meal deal adds up to affect the planet.
Over a thousand stickers have appeared this month in supermarkets around London, but stickers have been spotted around the UK as eco-friendly shoppers try to help spread the message.
Speaking to Manchester Evening News, Gags and Joe explained how their idea came about.
They said: "So imagine this. It’s the year 3019. Animals can now be tried in court. The prisons are overflowing with pigeons. You are no longer around.
"But the plastic water bottle you bought with your meal dea in 2020 has finally started to decompose. Even if the future isn’t quite as weird as that, it is true that your meal deal could be pretty much immortal."
Revealing their ambitions, the duo said: "The ultimate goal would be for supermarkets to add the Plastic Expiry Date to packaging themselves, as well as hurrying to remove single-use plastic packaging from their shelves."
If you want to find out more about the movement, follow @PlasticExpiry on Twitter, or head to their website.