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Top UK Supermarket Laser Prints Labels On Avocados To Reduce Waste (telegraph.co.uk)
One of the largest British retailers in London, M&S, is opting in for laser-printed barcodes to reduce paper waste. "The labels, which are etched onto fruit's skins with lasers instead of stickers, will save 10 tons of paper and five tons of glue every year according to M&S," reports The Telegraph. The labels will be etched into the skins of avocados, but "could soon be introduced to other fruit and vegetables and adopted by other supermarkets which are looking for new waste reduction techniques." The labels themselves include the shop logo, best before date, country of origin and product code for entering at the till. What's more is that the avocado's skin is the only area impacted by the lasers -- none of the fruit gets damaged. Bruce66423 writes: Print the information usually on the packaging to reduce waste. Excellent idea -- although the Aldi (the radically cheap, all own brand chain) alternative is to leave avocados untouched and get the cashiers to enter the code.
Employees and customers are next.
Hopefully apples too - anyone else annoyed by little stickers on apples?
"Will people then be sold in supermarkets too?"
Of course not, they'll be an app for that (like Uber). No one wants to pay retail for people!
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It doesn't work on majority of fruits. Most of the information they print is redundant. Nobody needs the shop logo. The country of origin is already printed on the bin. The product code can be memorized/looked up by the cashier. That only leaves the best-by date, which, in the case of avocados, isn't very reliable.
Some packaging is way over the top, and the vast majority of household waste at least for me is in the form of packaging...
Virtually no packaging can be reused, not much biodegrades and only some can be recycled through an energy intensive process of melting it all down again.
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My local supermarket started individually shrink-wrapping fruit for your environmentally destructive pleasure. :-(
Kiwis aren't fruit, they're birds.
They're also endangered so you shouldn't be eating them either.
Or do you mean Kiwifruit?
No, not the "666", mark-of-the-beast guys. Yes, those too. But I'm talking about a more local conspiracy (frankly, I haven't met anyone outside of Europe that considers this real, shows that not all loonies that can come up with insane bullshit are located in the US), that those bars can act as some sort of "antenna" and absorb "frequencies" from various sources, which then affect the product, and of course in a negative way.
But luckily, there's hope! You can buy a Sharpie... ok, of course it's not a simple Sharpie, it's an energetically activated (insert more mumbo-jumbo woo here) for the low, low price of 30-50 bucks, and with this you can "connect" those bars and neutralize them that way.
By now some of makers of products aimed at ... let's say energetically challenged people have started to print their barcodes "neutralized", pretty much saying "if they want it that way, it doesn't bother us, so ... let them have it...".
We're now at the point where they seriously demand hazard pay for people working the supermarket checkout.
So no, idiocy is by no means a privilege of the US, we can do it just as well!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So basically tomorrow some headline-grabber piece of crap pseudo doctor will say lasering avocados causes autism. Thanks, UK doctors.
M&S brand coconuts with their logo, expiry date, and the till code as well. I don't know if it's laser'd or just plain old branding, but they've been doing that for a while now.
They still wrap the bloody things in shrinkwrap for reasons unknown.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
I've planted three trees in the back yard, irrigated by rainwater.
It might take a decade to bear fruit but they're very easy to propagate from pit.
To produce three avocados, you need 264 gallons of water = 1m^3 = 1000 liters. That is more water than consumed by a child in one year.
Children consume a lot more water. For instance, if your child eats 1 avocado per month, they are already 4 times over that amount.
In the UK Kiwis are fruit. They may alternately be flightless birds but we generally encounter the fruit more frequently.
Nobody here calls it kiwifruit.
M&S are one of the UKs largest retailers, but only about 60% of their revenue is from food. See here. Which means that they are outside of the top 10 in terms of grocery sales.They are a small player in terms of food sales who specialize in luxury foods. This is just a curiosity news piece about a small specialist retailer who have found another way to push their luxury brand and its values.
Found the person from Morganville!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Light Amplification by Zimulated Emission of Radiation
- nice over-britishization
Laser spelt with a "Z" is not a British spelling, it's an American spelling. It is spelt with an "S" in Britain. The bastardisation of the abbreviation originates on the Western edge of the pond.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It really cannot be that difficult to make the checkout systems simply recognize unpacked food using computer vision....
0x or or snor perron?!