The 2022 plastic and garbage ranking of domestic grocery stores has been published

The green organization came to the conclusion that most of the surveyed shops need improvement if they want to reduce their plastic pollution, and therefore launched a petition for the reduction of single-use plastics. In this year’s survey, SPAR achieved the best result, followed by Auchan and Tesco in Greenpeace’s ranking.

In recent years, Greenpeace has examined and evaluated food retail chains in several countries

Among other things, these were measured in terms of how many packaging-free products are on the shelves, whether it is possible to refill and recycle in stores, and whether we can take products home in single-use plastic bags or environmentally friendly bags. This year, for the first time, this survey was also carried out in Hungary in the nine largest food chains present in our country. The research was carried out using two methods: on the one hand, Greenpeace Hungary activists conducted an on-site survey in thirty-six domestic stores of the nine food chains between July 1 and August 1, 2022. On the other hand, the environmental protection organization directly approached the food chains with a questionnaire survey so that they could provide their own data.

*The figure shows the average of the percentage results obtained from the scores that can be obtained during the research.

The ranking of the food chains was as follows in the 2022 survey: SPAR took first place, followed by Auchan, Tesco, Lidl, ALDI, PENNY, CBA, Coop, and Reál took the last place. According to Greenpeace, the evaluation of CBA, Coop and Real was made difficult by the fact that these chains did not respond to their inquiry at all, so they could only be ranked based on an on-site survey by the organization’s activists. Those who are interested in the detailed results can also browse through Greenpeace’s complete research report.

In its report, in addition to revealing the shortcomings, Greenpeace also highlighted several positive developments in relation to the stores

Some companies have a publicly available strategy for their plastic reduction, while in others the goal set for the packaging of private label products is to be made from 100 percent recycled materials. An outstanding number of products were available as refills in SPAR stores, such as hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, sunflowers, pumpkin seeds, millet, and couscous. In the case of Auchan, it is outstanding that they have returnable mineral water beverage packaging at the network level. Tesco’s answers revealed that 82 percent of the waste from their operations was recycled in the previous year, which means almost 124 tons of hangers alone. According to Greenpeace’s survey, the largest selection and proportion of packaging-free vegetables and fruits could be found in Lidl stores. And SPAR and Auchan no longer gave free plastic bags, but only for degradable money.

“Greenpeace started this research because plastic waste is slowly covering us, causing more and more damage to nature and has already appeared in the human body as well. Everyone has the right to shop so that everything is not wrapped in disposable plastic, and to choose products with returnable packaging.” – said Simon Gergely, chemical expert of Greenpeace Hungary.