Packaging
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Packaging, or more specifically excessive packaging has an enormous impact on the amount of waste produced by modern societies.
Contents |
Understanding packaging
Some form of packaging is essential to the satisfactory delivery of many products from the provider to the consumer. Other products, from vehicle fuel to loose vegetables, need none. Much packaging is more concerned with marketing the product than with its safe arrival.
The needs of the environment now dictate that packaging should be:
- Minimised or eliminated
- Reusable or easily recyclable, preferably 100%
The causes
Some packaging serves mainly to hold together a quantity of product, for example coffee beans or shampoo. Unless a shopper brings an empty container, and unless the shop is prepared to sell such products loose, a container has to be provided by the manufacturer. Some environmentally aware retailers do sell loose product, refilling a customer's container, but that approach would be very unusual in most supermarkets.
Some packaging is essential to the protection of a product in its journey from manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, to end customer. Many electronic and white goods would fall in this category.
Some parts of packaging are concerned mostly with attracting customer attention. Many products are now bubble packed in transparent plastics (particularly PET) so that the customer can see every detail of the product as it sits or hangs on the store shelf.
Much packaging these days is probably at the dictates of the few huge supermarket chains. Products are wrapped solely in order to fulfil their needs to attach a bar code or to present a product by hanging it on a peg instead of having it lie flat on a shelf.
Evidence
See all the evidence you could ask for at your shopping centre. Analyse the packaging and determine whether it is essential and how environmentally sensitive it is.
Cost-benefit analysis
What are the solutions
A solution should follow a problem. The problem of packaging is that it often just waste in a world that needs for there to be no more waste (as there is no room left to store it), and no more consumption of non-renewable materials (as they are running out).
The solution lies in following some simple guidelines:
- Minimise or eliminate packaging
- Ensure that packaging can be reused or at least 100% recycled
Minimise
Those who design packaging need to allow environmental concerns to take precedence over other issues, such as marketing. In fact, an astute marketer can take deliberate action to promote a product by emphasising that the packaging has been carefully constructed with the environment in mind.
Examples of "How not to package" can be seen on every shelf in every supermarket. For example, 100gm freeze dried coffee (which occupies ~400ml) came in a 300gm glass jar, with a 50gm plastic lid, totalling about 850ml of space, plus a little extra no doubt for the large cardboard box used to deliver many bottles to the supermarket. The plastic lid was obviously made from two different plastics (one clear, one opaque), neither of which was marked with the standard recycling symbol and number. Trash! The glass jar was obviously recyclable, but of course not everyone has recycling services available and those that do might not always use them. True, the jar is reuable in the kitchen, but there is a limit to the need for such jars.
In summary, the packed product weighed nearly five times the raw product, and took up over twice its space. The additional transport costs and shelf space needs are obvious.
In contrast, 200gm of ground coffee came as a vacuum packed "brick" using a polythene and metal foil wrapping that weighed about 10gm. The packed product was perhaps 5% larger and weighed 5% more than the raw product. Not perfect, since the discarded wrapping is totally waste, but far better than the above product!
Reuse and recycle
There are some examples of packaging that can be reused. Some glass food containers can be used in the kitchen for storing other products that have come in polythene bags. For example, lentils in an old coffee jar. Some jams are sold in drinking glasses, so only the metal lid is waste.
Reuse is good, but there are limits. No kitchen has an infinite demand for jars and drinking glasses, and few shops offer refilling.
So it is important that packaging is as close as possible to 100% recyclable. That means manufacturers must be aware of the usual recycling services provided to their customers, and avoid materials that cannot be recycled.
Different materials must be easily separable and identifiable. Paper, carboard, aluminium, steel, and glass are usually self evident, but plastics need typically to be recycling types 1 to 5, and very clearly marked with the recycle triangle and number.
Organisations that work to reduce packaging
This could be YOU especially if you have email, which makes it easy and free to mail the offending organisation.
Please consider looking at all the packaging you buy with your consumables, and pick out the worst cases. Work out what the packaging consists of, what is its weight and volume compared to the product, and email the data to the manufacturer's customer relations department.
Time and again you will find plastic that is clearly PET or HDPE or LDPE but it is not marked as such. That plastic was oil.
