Aldi’s attempts to reduce food waste appear to be failing, with the supermarket chain having been found throwing out excessive quantities of perfectly good food.
Ever since the German supermarket chain opened its first store in Sydney back in 2001, Aldi has managed to carve out its own niche in the world of Australian supermarkets, becoming one of the more popular choices over the years.
In the past few years though, the company has come under fire for the disproportionately large amount of waste that they produce. While the recent decision to ban plastic bags highlighted just how much plastic the chain uses when it comes to packaging items and produce, it appears that their attempts to eliminate food waste still have a ways to go as well.
According to Aldi’s website, since 2017, 100% of their stores have been linked to at least one food rescue partner. This means that, in theory, any excess food which is set to go unsold by the chain is donated to organisations such as Foodbank, OzHarvest, and SecondBite. This initiative aims to not only reduce food waste, but also aims to ensure that by working with a number of charity and community groups, that those who need the food will have it come their way instead.
However, it seems as though some of the stores haven’t quite been following through with this plan.
Taking to Facebook recently, Carmen Will, who runs the Foodshare Melbourne Facebook group, shared images of the excessive amount of perfectly good food that she retrieved from two of Aldi’s bins.
“Last night I went on my first real dumpster diving mission,” Carmen began. “Most of this haul came from 2 Aldi bins alone. It’s absolutely disgusting the amount they throw away all because they package their produce in plastic and label it with a use by date.”
“Of the 25 avocados we got, half aren’t even ripe yet, let alone off! This is insanity. Judge me as you will, but I just saved all this from landfill and I saved cash at the same time.”
As Carmen notes, the food that was retrieved from the bins was not only perfectly fine due to the amount of packaging involved, but when it came to certain items of produce, some had not even ripened yet, raising questions about why exactly it was being thrown out in the first place.
As it turns out, Aldi’s reputation for disposing of perfectly good food is rather well-known among ‘freegans’, which is a term used to describe people who choose to often subsist on discarded goods such as this.
In fact, a cursory glance of the Dumpster Diving group on Reddit shows that Aldi is in fact a popular location to frequent thanks to the excessive amount of food that they throw out.
As Carmen also pointed out in the comments of her post, some supermarkets have been known to pour bleach into their bins in order to prevent people from taking any of the produce that they throw out, making this waste even more egregious.
Of course, some may in fact point out that Aldi’s decisions involved in throwing out the food are unknown, but the fact remains that something needs to be done to combat the amount of food being thrown away from supermarkets.
While Aldi’s pledge to ensure that any excess or unsold food is donated to an organisation such as Foodbank is definitely well-intentioned, it appears that the policy may need a bit of fine tuning, or at the very least, a rethink to ensure that this level of food does not reach the point where it needs to be thrown out.
Check out more photo’s of Carmen’s findings at Aldi:
