Unsustainable Packaging
Unsustainable packaging is everywhere, it is essentially general packaging that goes straight to our bins never to be seen again other than in the form of yet another landfill site that are slowly infiltrating our landscapes. Often a luxury item is endorsed by lots of packaging and the price inflated to match. There are countless examples of this in food products and elsewhere.
Merci chocolate comes wrapped in cellophane, in a cardboard box and each chocolate is individually wrapped giving it a sense of class and luxury. For this type of plastic to decompose it takes hundred of years just to weather and it never fully bio degrades.
Ferro Rocher is the other obvious brand that is making the wrong choices in its packaging, the use of a hard plastic case, the first of its problems.
There are easy ways around bad packaging and improvements that can be made. With the chosen Merci product for example, there is no need for the cellophane and the individual wrappers, these can be discarded and perhaps replaced with a wrapper made from plant fibre that covers all the chocolates, not individually.
Do rubbers really need to come in a hard plastic cover, attached to cardboard, covered in individual plastics and with a paper label around it as well? Or could we just buy it with a sticky label on it that states the brand name, all the risks involved with a rubber and a barcode. Do we really need all the uproar on the back of the packaging that merely encourages people to sue when the toxins in the rubber irritate their eye?
And then there's the razors. Who knew shaving was such an expensive and overly packaged ordeal we have to go through. Each spare blade comes in its own hard case, the whole product enclosed in hard plastic and lots of paper labels with six seperate plastic blade protectors incase the 3 year old takes a fancy to shaving. Of course there are some basic safety measures that must be covered such as that one but the other 2 layers of plastic and advertising are unnecessary and merely there to push prices up.
This raises the question of pricing and cost. How come a highly over packaged product can still cost less than a sustainably packaged one? Sustainable goes against the trends and cannot compete with the cheap plastics marketed in such high quantities. If we make it the fashion, as it will have to become, the tides will change and prices will drop, not only with sustainable packaging but as other companies are forced to compete, amounts of packaging will drop along with the cost.
Ferro Rocher is the other obvious brand that is making the wrong choices in its packaging, the use of a hard plastic case, the first of its problems.
There are easy ways around bad packaging and improvements that can be made. With the chosen Merci product for example, there is no need for the cellophane and the individual wrappers, these can be discarded and perhaps replaced with a wrapper made from plant fibre that covers all the chocolates, not individually.
Do rubbers really need to come in a hard plastic cover, attached to cardboard, covered in individual plastics and with a paper label around it as well? Or could we just buy it with a sticky label on it that states the brand name, all the risks involved with a rubber and a barcode. Do we really need all the uproar on the back of the packaging that merely encourages people to sue when the toxins in the rubber irritate their eye?
And then there's the razors. Who knew shaving was such an expensive and overly packaged ordeal we have to go through. Each spare blade comes in its own hard case, the whole product enclosed in hard plastic and lots of paper labels with six seperate plastic blade protectors incase the 3 year old takes a fancy to shaving. Of course there are some basic safety measures that must be covered such as that one but the other 2 layers of plastic and advertising are unnecessary and merely there to push prices up.
This raises the question of pricing and cost. How come a highly over packaged product can still cost less than a sustainably packaged one? Sustainable goes against the trends and cannot compete with the cheap plastics marketed in such high quantities. If we make it the fashion, as it will have to become, the tides will change and prices will drop, not only with sustainable packaging but as other companies are forced to compete, amounts of packaging will drop along with the cost.