Giving Compass' Take:

• Thailand has made a shift towards using eco-friendly materials such as banana leaves in their supermarkets as a replacement for plastic in an effort to significantly reduce the amount of waste overall that gets sent to landfills and contaminates ecosystems.

• What are other countries around the globe doing to eliminate non-biodegradable waste? 

• Learn about what America does with recycled plastics.

Supermarkets in Thailand are wrapping vegetables in banana leaves to cut down on plastic packaging, according to Vice.

The development was documented in a Facebook post last month showing asparagus, peppers, and cucumbers wrapped in green banana leaves in the fresh produce section of the Rimping supermarket in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Since then, other supermarkets in the country and in Vietnam have begun experimenting with this natural packaging as well.

Banana trees are common throughout Thailand and can yield leaves as big as 9 feet in length. People around the world already use them to cover various types of foods, and their sturdiness makes them an ideal form of packaging for fresh produce that sells quickly (because they’re biodegradable, they can’t sit on the shelf for months).

Read the full article on Thailand's supermarket move to cut down plastic by Joe McCarthy and Erica Sanchez at Global Citizen.