Five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year and more than 99% are never recycled.
As a trusted retailer and partner in our communities, we have an obligation to operate in a sustainable way that benefits everyone. Giant Eagle has established an aggressive goal to eliminate single-use plastics from our operations by 2025. By reducing the use of plastic bags at checkout and designing more eco-friendly packaging we’re able to divert significant waste from our landfills.
Together, we have the potential to divert up to 12.4 million pounds of plastic annually:
Reducing Plastic Bags at Checkout
To achieve our goal of removing single-use plastics from our operations, we’re starting to eliminate single-use plastic bags from our registers. So far, we have successfully removed plastic bags from all GetGo locations, as well as our supermarkets in:
Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), OH
Erie, PA
Carmel, IN
Columbus, OH
As we expand this elimination across our enterprise, *we have the potential to prevent 6.5 million pounds of plastic bags annually from ever reaching landfills.
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Innovative Giant Eagle Brand Packaging
In addition to reducing plastic bag usage, we are actively working to reduce the amount of single-use plastic that our products come packaged in. Some ways we have accomplished this so far include:
An ongoing partnership with How2Recycle, who helped us add instructions for Guests to best dispose of packaging and encourage the best recycling practices.
Transitioning our Own Brand fresh chicken from a foam tray to a fully recyclable PET 1 tray, representing 1 million pounds of plastic that will be diverted from landfills annually.
Adding resealable film tops to our lettuce boxes, eliminating more than 30% of the total weight of the packaging—that’s over 100,000 pounds less plastic used