The Green Party has slammed a new marketing ploy for apples saying it would be a good target for the Government’s new plan to keep plastic bags out of landfills.

Fresh Edge is producing Fruitees, 80 gram plastic packets of sliced apples, which have been endorsed by the 5 + A Day programme and Kiwi Regional Netball.

"While it’s completely true that apples are great snack foods, they don’t need processing and packaging," Greens spokesperson on Waste Nandor Tanczos says.

"Apples already have their own wrappers – the skin that nature provided them with, and it is relatively easy for consumers to chop them into segments for their kids or themselves. Without all the processing and plastic packaging they are relatively cheap, they are nutritious and best of all the waste that’s left over – the core – is completely biodegradable.

"The Government today announced that it wanted to reduce the amount of plastic packaging going into landfills – well this is a classic example of where we are wasting valuable resources and needlessly creating tonnes of waste.

"I simply will not believe that humankind has got so lazy that it can no longer eat an apple with out it having been pre-sliced and bagged for them.

"Fresh Edge would better serve New Zealand by using its marketing weight to encourage people to eat apples au naturel, instead of adding tonnes of plastic to our already growing waste mountain," Nandor says.