In honor of Earth Day, Fry’s Food Stores, a division of The Kroger Family of Companies, are encouraging customers to return their plastic bags and single-use plastic packaging to any of the 127 Fry’s stores on April 22 as part of Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste social impact plan. They will then be collected and recycled to create new items, like composite lumber and decking materials. Customers are encouraged to bring in grocery and retail shopping bags, bubble wrap, plastic cereal box liners, bread bags, dry cleaning bags, produce bags, newspaper sleeves, plastic shipping envelopes, clean sandwich bags and the plastic overwrap around paper towels, toilet tissue, and other similar items.
“Earth Day is a perfect time to share our plastics recycling program with customers and the community,” said Pam Giannonatti, Fry’s Corporate Affairs Manager. “Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues, and we at Fry’s are committed to being good environmental stewards to reduce as much plastic as possible from going into our landfills.”
Many consumers may not realize that plastic bags are not accepted as part of the state’s curbside recycling programs – they get tangled in equipment. Fry’s plastic recycling program makes it easy to recycle a variety of plastics by bringing them to their neighborhood store and depositing them into the plastic recycling bins located in the front vestibule. The materials are then collected and recycled into other products such as park benches, plastic landscape bricks, and plastic lumber.
In 2023, Fry’s recycled 47 million pounds of plastics and cardboard from its stores and has committed to phasing out single-use plastic bags and transition to reusable bags by 2025. Some estimates suggest that fewer than one in seven plastic bags are recycled, leaving 100 billion single-use plastic bags being thrown away in the U.S. every year. Currently, single-use plastic bags are the fifth-most common single-use plastic found in the environment by magnitude.
Additionally, this Earth Month, the Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation is partnering with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to highlight wildlife and the importance of protecting their habitats for generations to come. Customers can support WWF by rounding up their transaction or donating at the register coinboxes; 100 percent of each customer donation made in April will go directly to support WWF and their mission.
“This Earth Month, we’re excited to once again partner with the World Wildlife Fund to bring awareness to their important work,” said Giannonatti. “Together, through our efforts, we are working to protect our beautiful earth and achieve a more sustainable future.”
About Fry’s Food Stores
At Fry’s Food Stores, a company of The Kroger Family of Companies (NYSE: KR), we are Fresh for Everyone™ and dedicated to our Purpose: To Feed the Human Spirit®, so much that Fry’s was declared Arizona’s Most Popular Grocery Store according to Nasdaq.com, citing a 2024 survey conducted by wisevoter.com, and Kroger/Fry’s was recognized in 2023 by Newsweek as one of “America’s Most Trustworthy Companies” and named “Phoenix’s favorite grocery store” by Axios. Headquartered in Tolleson, Fry’s has been serving Arizonans since 1960. We are Arizona’s fourth largest employer with more than 20,000 associates, 127 Fry’s Food Stores, and 100 fuel centers across the state. As a division of The Kroger Family of Companies, we care about the communities we serve, working to end hunger and eliminate waste across the company through our Zero Hunger | Zero Waste social impact plan. Last year, we provided over 16 million meals to Arizona’s hungry families and diverted 103 million pounds of waste from Arizona’s landfills.
