by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Containers and packaging account for 1/3 of weight & volume of municipal solid waste.
We must rethink packaging and the way that we use and waste it and that rather pronto.
Either packaging must be reduced and there definitely is well too much packing being used, often to wrap a product up about three times – stupid, I know – or, and this probably would be better still, we, the designers that is, must come up with packaging that is designed to have a second life.
Nutella® still ships some of its chocolate spread in glass containers that, after use, are drinking glasses. All mustard in Germany and France once came in reusable glasses as containers. This is NOT rocket science and there are ways of designing and employing containers that, after serving as packaging, can have a second or even third use.
Way too much packaging is being used, such as when we look at the Braun® electric tooth brush heads that are already packed individually in a blister and then get packed in a bigger blister pack still. This does not compute and others are as guilty, and sometimes even more so, than Braun, for example.
Too much packaging materials and containers also are in use that cannot be recycled, such as, for instance the packaging used for potato chips (crisps as they are known in Britain) or the containers for the Capri Sun drinks. Those, for instance are laminates that cannot be separated again for recycling and hence, unless upcycled by the likes of TerraCycle Inc., end up in landfill.
In addition to that there are plastic containers too used in packaging that cannot – at least not at this present time – be recycled by a great many, if not indeed all, municipal recycling stations. In Britain, for instance, only plastics #1 and #2 are acceptable for recycling; all other plastic bottles and containers, even though the councils may pick them up with the roadside recycling units, in fact, end up in landfill or incineration.
Ideas such as changing from cardboard cereal packets to the use of plastic bags, as suggested and advocated by UK grocer Sainsbury's is definitely the wrong approach. Plastic is not a sustainable product which cardboard can be.
While with paper and cardboard there may not be currently much of a market in the recycling resellers field paper and cardboard can, however, just be chucked into composters and thus return to the earth.
In addition to that there are so many other ways that such cartons can be reused by the customer, from making them into compost, to, before they every have to go that route, colorful bookmarks, covers for rescued paper notebooks, to name but a few.
A further way of reducing packaging must be to return to the way we used to shop for our groceries when I was a child.
The stored had the stuff in bulk and you bought it by the weight or measure and then it went into your own containers, whether milk cans, glass jars or into paper bags supplied by the store in the case of dry goods such as pulses, candy, etc.
As I have said before and will keep saying; we must look at the past to go towards a sustainable future.
© 2009
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We are drowning in packaging waste
