A Plastic Icon Transitions to Cardboard
Are you ready for biodegradable bread clips? Plus: An inconspicuous mystery!
The photo shown above was recently sent to me by reader Jim Walaitis. He had just purchased a pack of English muffins at his local Aldi and was surprised to discover that the bread clip — the little bag-closure thingie in the foreground of the photo — was made of cardboard instead of the usual plastic. Here’s a closer look:
The “BPI” icon on the clip is the logo of the Biodegradable Products Institute, certifying that the clips are compostable — something that obviously wouldn’t be possible with traditional plastic bread clips, which are made of polystyrene. (As you may recall from our recent discussion of produce stickers, some of those labels are also changing from plastic to compostable paper.)
Jim had never seen a cardboard bread clip before and figured it might be of interest to Inconspicuous Consumption. Or as he put it in his email to me, “It concerns me when I see something and my very first thought is ‘Does Paul Lukas know about this?’”
Truthfully, I should have known about it, because I have a longstanding fascination with bread clips. I first blogged about them in 2012; a year later, I wrote a Bloomberg Businessweek article about the eternal tug of war between bread clips and twist ties (which was cited by The New Yorker and Longreads as one of the best business articles of 2013, whoop-whoop). And I keep a small supply of bread clips on hand in a kitchen drawer, so I can swap them in if I buy a product with a twist tie.
