Why We Ban Single-Use Plastics Across Our Offices and Fields

Plastic debris has been found in the stomachs of green sea turtles along the Great Barrier Reef, in the sands of Bondi Beach, and in the soil of cane farms outside Cairns. The cumulative weight of these findings has pushed regulators, retailers, and growers in Australia toward a clear position: single-use plastics no longer belong in daily operations. Fresh Del Monte Produce has chosen to formalise that position inside our own footprint, removing disposable plastic items from corporate offices, packing facilities, and the field stations that support tropical fruit production across multiple continents.

The change touches everything from the bottled water in a Brisbane meeting room to the cling film used to wrap pineapples at a Caribbean port. By drawing a line through both white-collar and blue-collar environments, the company is signalling that sustainability cannot live in a single department. It has to become a default setting, embedded in procurement, in kitchens, and in the lunchrooms where shift workers sit between harvesting cycles.

Australia offers a particularly instructive backdrop for this shift. The country has moved faster than almost any other major economy in restricting single-use items at the state level, and its consumers increasingly read packaging labels the way they read nutrition facts. Australian colleagues were among the first to push for a company-wide position, partly because the legal landscape around them was already tightening and partly because the marine and reef ecosystems tied to our global supply chain are visible from their office windows.

The phased removal covers more than a thousand small decisions. It reaches the seedling trays in a nursery, the sample cups at a sensory panel, the earplugs wrapped in plastic at a packing station, and the stirrers dropped into a flat white during a regional sales meeting in Melbourne. Treating every one of those items as part of the same problem is the principle behind the ban, and it shapes the rollout described below.

Scope of the Phase-Out Across Office and Field Sites

Across our corporate offices, the immediate targets are familiar: disposable coffee cups, plastic cutlery, plastic water bottles, sachets of condiments, and the polystyrene clamshells used in staff canteens. In field operations, the list expands to include irrigation fittings, seedling bags, mulch films, protective covers, and the strapping that secures pallets of bananas and melons for export. Each category is being replaced with a reusable, compostable, or recyclable alternative that has been tested for food safety and durability.

Procurement teams in our regional hubs now require suppliers to certify the recycled content and end-of-life pathway of any packaging that enters our supply chain. Where a paper or plant-based substitute performs as well as plastic, it is adopted. Where it does not, the item is re-engineered so that the whole system, not just the wrapper, is redesigned. The aim is a measurable drop in virgin plastic volume per tonne of fruit shipped rather than a symbolic gesture.

The transition is being led locally, because the conditions are rarely uniform. A field station in Costa Rica deals with humidity, monsoons, and long-haul refrigerated transport, while a satellite office in Sydney must navigate office towers, lease rules, and council waste contracts. Allowing regional managers to choose compliant alternatives within a defined framework keeps the policy both ambitious and workable.

How Field Operations Are Adapting

In the field, plastic has always been useful because it is cheap, light, and water-resistant. Banana bunch covers, for example, have traditionally been made of low-density polyethylene because the material protects fruit from scarring, insects, and sunburn during the long growing cycle. Replacing it is not as simple as swapping in a paper bag, which collapses in tropical rain and tears on the stalk. Our agronomy teams have spent several seasons trialling woven polypropylene sleeves that can be washed, dried, and reused across multiple production cycles.

Packing houses have moved away from single-use plastic strapping toward either steel or recycled-content PET strapping that is returned to the supplier under a closed-loop arrangement. The plastic trays that once held pineapples for export are being substituted with moulded fibre trays, and the netting that wrapped melons has been replaced with a compostable cellulose sleeve. Each change is documented in our freshdelmontecsr.com sustainability reports, where the cumulative volumes of plastic diverted are published against annual baselines.

Training is a quiet but essential part of the transition. Harvesting crews in the Philippines, Costa Rica, and Kenya attend short modules on the new handling procedures, because compostable materials behave differently under heat and moisture. When a crew understands why a fibre tray cannot be rinsed and reused the way a plastic one could, contamination drops and the new system holds.

Workplace Operations and Employee-Led Shifts

The office half of the ban has moved quickly, in part because Australian workplaces were already primed for it. In Sydney and Melbourne, building managers are accustomed to tenants requesting compostable serviceware and to installing filtered water stations in lieu of bottled water. Our regional headquarters installed refill points on every floor during the most recent fit-out, and the staff café replaced plastic-lined paper cups with cups made entirely of plant-based PLA that is industrially compostable.

Internal campaigns have encouraged employees to bring their own containers, to choose tap water over bottled, and to flag any remaining single-use items they spot during a normal working day. The reports that come back are granular: a plastic stirrer in the Buenos Aires office, a polystyrene cup at a training event in Dubai, a sealed plastic spoon in a hotel breakfast pack during a regional visit. Each report is logged and resolved within a defined window.

Behavioural nudges matter as much as procurement. When a meeting room is set up with reusable glassware instead of bottled water, attendees rarely request a bottle. When the default snack at an internal event is served in bowls rather than individual wrappers, plastic use drops by more than half without anyone feeling deprived. The office is, in this sense, a small laboratory for the larger operational change.

Australia as Both Catalyst and Customer

Australia's regulatory environment accelerated our internal timeline. Queensland banned single-use plastic straws, stirrers, and cutlery in 2021 and expanded the list to include plates and bowls in subsequent phases. South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory followed with comprehensive bans, and Victoria phased out a long list of items between 2023 and 2024. New South Wales has rolled out staged restrictions covering items such as plastic bags, microbeads, and certain packaging formats. Operating in or exporting to this country means complying with the strictest of those rules across product lines.

The state-level actions shaping our packaging decisions most directly include:

• Queensland's staged bans covering straws, cutlery, plates, bowls, and expanded polystyrene takeaway containers
• South Australia's longstanding restrictions on plastic bags and its later expansion to additional single-use items
• Victoria's phased prohibition on problematic single-use plastics across hospitality and retail
• New South Wales' plastic plan, which targets microbeads, lightweight bags, and certain packaging formats

Retail partners reinforce the signal. Major supermarket chains in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide have made public commitments to reduce plastic packaging on fresh produce, and they expect suppliers to demonstrate progress. The market has begun to favour fruit that arrives in fibre-based or returnable packaging, and the price premium for compliant goods has narrowed as volume scales.

There is also a reputational dimension that Australian audiences read clearly. Communities near the reef, along the Murray-Darling Basin, and across remote Northern Territory stations understand the link between inland plastic waste and downstream marine damage. When operational data is published, those communities tend to compare it against the targets set by local councils and against the visible condition of their own beaches, which keeps reporting honest.

Tracking What Actually Changes

Numbers anchor the work. Each quarter, our sustainability team reconciles the kilograms of single-use plastic purchased against production volumes, separating office procurement from field procurement. The headline figure is plastic avoided per tonne of fruit handled, which normalises the data across seasons and regions where yields fluctuate. Auditors verify the totals against supplier invoices and waste manifests, and the methodology is published openly so that external reviewers can challenge it.

The workstreams defining the next phase include:

• Scaling compostable banana bunch covers to additional growing regions
• Closing the loop on PET strapping through supplier take-back programmes
• Replacing remaining polystyrene coolers in field offices with reusable insulated containers
• Expanding refill stations in offices across the Asia-Pacific region

Targets have been set in three-year windows, with interim checkpoints at twelve and twenty-four months. Internal scorecards rate each site on procurement shifts, behavioural adoption, and waste-stream audits. Where a site falls behind, a small support team works with local management to identify the operational barrier, whether it is a supplier constraint, a lease restriction, or a behavioural pattern the campaign has not yet reached.

The next concrete step is a region-by-region packaging audit during the upcoming harvest, beginning in our Australian and New Zealand distribution hubs. Findings from that audit will feed directly into the procurement specifications for the following season, so that the items ordered in 2026 already reflect what 2025's plastic-reduction work has taught us. Plastic will keep showing up in the supply chain, but its role will keep shrinking, one banana sleeve, one coffee cup, and one office kitchen at a time.