>>> Consumers can make a difference by buying less, or buying products that can more easily be reused or recycled, but that’s only part of the equation. Countries, states and cities need to press producers to design more sustainable products and packaging, and develop more recycling infrastructure.
What? No mention of corporations, of the many corporate interests that this material serves. I don't want plastic wrapping on everything. So long as the product gets where it needs to be nor does the manufacture really care. It is the middle men, the retail stores, that insist on the extra packaging. Lots of packaging is there for purely commercial interests such as to prevent easy theft or as space for advertising.
I recently ordered some flashlights from china. They were made of aluminum and came in simple cardboard boxes. Nearly all of the order was recyclable. No inky labels, no bubble wrap, no silly nylon lanyards, no plastic beyond a tiny piece of tape to hold the box closed. Nothing was in those boxes except for the exact product I ordered. That's the progress we need.
The extra packaging is used because it's cheap. Sure, Coke could start using only glass for its bottles, but then prices would go up and Pepsi would undercut them. Government action has to come first to establish a new baseline, otherwise whoever moves first will lose.
A big advantage of plastic is how it's airtight and waterproof, which is a great property for a lot of food packaging. Reduces spoilage and making a mess if contents break. Also it's a stronger material.
I've noticed with a lot of electronics nowadays, most of the packaging is made with cardboard although, because it doesn't need those properties.
When I was young, there were still "true" generic items in grocery stores. Not store brands, but white packaging with a simple food label.
Unsurprisingly, they weren't very popular. Customers have brand preferences, rational or not, and the word "generic" has strongly negative connotations.
(Speaking for myself, I can say that real Pop Tarts taste much better than the store brand alternatives I've tried, which were edible but rather unpleasant.)
For physical retail I don't think packaging is going to go anywhere, and I suspect manufacturers would rather package everything the same, whether it's going to physical stores or being sold online.
I think part of the unpopularity of the generic brands was that, at least in the stores I remember, they were all segregated on an aisle full of generic products. So you had to specifically go down that aisle to see if there was a generic version of whatever you wanted, and there was a bit of a social stigma about being seen in that aisle.
I imagine they would have fared better if they had been mixed into the rest of the aisles the way store brand products are today.
> When I was young, there were still "true" generic items in grocery stores. Not store brands, but white packaging with a simple food label.
I remember seeing this style of packaging in the '90s, but as far as I saw it was really more like stealth branding because it was all from the same company (Valu Time). This company allegedly operated like a store brand supplier behind the scenes despite the store's name not appearing on the packaging.
Most store brand suppliers a.k.a. private label co-packers (Cott,Ralcorp,etc.) also have their own (lesser-known) brands that they distribute to ultra-price-sensitive retail channels that don't want to incur the overhead of developing their own brand packaging or don't have the resources. These are called white-label products, though most of the time they don't actually have white-labels. This terminology actually carries over into the software world, as well, where companies will brand their generic software for your business to resell.
Source: Former subscriber to the trade magazine PLBuyer.
But the flashlights I bought were not generic. They were branded items that if bought in-store would have been in big plastic wrappings. I don't think they were illegitimate, just that they were shipped differently.
Understood. I’m speculating that, due to the importance of packaging in the physical world, that it will remain relatively uncommon in the online world, but that’s pure speculation.
I remember that aisle. All white labels with black block-letter words.
When I was very young and st the store with my mom, she'd always tell me the aisle was for albinos. Scared the crap out of me.
The UK government has announced plans to incentivise corporations to do exactly that by taxing excess packaging[1]. Unfortunately the UK alone won't significantly influence international corporations so this policy is likely to simply increase purchase prices, disproportionately affecting the poorest again.
If I order gift-wrapped perfume online and it's shipped as a bottle in a presentation box inside a gift box inside a shipping box, that's one type of waste packaging.
SD cards sold by bricks-and-mortar retailers come with big, tough clamshell packages to make it hard for shoplifters to fit a hundred dollars worth into their pockets. That's a different problem with a different solution.
If I buy a cucumber and it's wrapped in plastic, it's because the producers think the savings from the extended shelf life and reduced damage in transit outweigh the cost of applying the wrapping. That would need a different solution again.
If I buy a gallon of milk and it comes in a plastic jug, well, it has to come in something and glass bottles aren't cheaper. Once again, needs a different solution.
If I buy a computer monitor, and it comes with wasteful obsolete and foreign cables, that's yet another different problem...
Interesting that the written article didn't go into it, but the podcast episode definitely did talk about the corporations' role in this. Very good episode, highly encourage everyone to listen to it.
What? No mention of corporations, of the many corporate interests that this material serves. I don't want plastic wrapping on everything. So long as the product gets where it needs to be nor does the manufacture really care. It is the middle men, the retail stores, that insist on the extra packaging. Lots of packaging is there for purely commercial interests such as to prevent easy theft or as space for advertising.
I recently ordered some flashlights from china. They were made of aluminum and came in simple cardboard boxes. Nearly all of the order was recyclable. No inky labels, no bubble wrap, no silly nylon lanyards, no plastic beyond a tiny piece of tape to hold the box closed. Nothing was in those boxes except for the exact product I ordered. That's the progress we need.