Wholesaler rolls out plastic-free tomato punnets across Perth supermarkets

A tomato wholesaler in Western Australia is leading the charge in the agricultural industry's move away from plastic with punnets made from recycled cardboard — and he is encouraging others to do the same.

EPT Produce director Wally Di Giosaffate has worked with a local packaging company to find a suitable alternative to the plastic punnets that hold cherry and grape tomatoes.

The Perth-based wholesaler said people need to start doing something about the environment.

"There's a lot of grape and cherry tomatoes sold in Australia and that's a hell of lot of plastic," he said.

"It's a good feeling to be one of the first cabs off the rank to do [this]."

The punnets cost an additional 20 cents but Mr Di Giosaffatte said consumers were generally happy to pay to protect the environment. 

"If I passed [the cost] onto the grower, it would be about $1 a kilo for them. For someone who grows 150,000 kilos a season, that's $150,000 dollars [they're losing]." he said.

Profile Packaging general manager Brett Kelly said he had not seen this specific design used before in punnets Australia.

"Not to say that there isn't any ... [but] we took a bit of guidance from what we were seeing over in Europe and the US," he said.

The challenge was to come up with a sturdy, plastic-free container with ventilation holes in order to preserve the tomatoes for the same amount of time as plastic punnets do.  

After more than 12 months of tests and trials, the final design has been rolled out in supermarkets across Perth.

Mr Kelly said while he'd like to see a shift away from unnecessary plastic, in some instances plastic is unavoidable.

"We thought we'd make it as similar as possible to the existing plastic [punnets], because it would be more accepted that way," he said.

He thinks not all fruit and vegetables will be suited to this kind of packaging, "like strawberries, which is a soft fruit so they can get bruised easily."

Mr Kelly believes prolonging shelf life and preventing food waste needs to be taken into consideration.

"But if it's not necessary, I think we need to remove it," he said.

The WA government is moving forward with phasing out single-use plastics, but Environment Minister Reece Whitby said farmers and producers would be exempt from the current ban for now.

"We want a commonsense approach; we want to work with industry. And if there are issues along the way, we want to be able to discuss them and work with the community to reduce the use of plastic — especially single use plastic." he said.

"At this stage, there is no specific target for banning plastics in fresh produce in the future.

However, Mr Whitby indicated this could be looked at in the future and encouraged producers to plan ahead.

"But we are looking down the track, further afield at how we can improve [packaging around fresh produce]," he said.

"Now I don't know what that looks like, but I'm certainly asking producers and suppliers what they can come up with in the future as an alternative."

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