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Monday, December 27, 2010
News The case against excess packaging
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 1:35 PM
One of the reasons people choose to buy used things more often than new things is because of all of the packaging accompanying new products. Remember: Plastic is made from petroleum, and cardboard comes from trees ... and that's not even getting into all of the energy it takes to produce those packaging materials or how much extra we're charged for them. Plus, much of that excess packaging ends up in our landfills, adding to our pollution woes as the landfill burps methane.
It's a big problem that we can't ignore. One way you can help is to reduce the amount of waste you generate by making wise purchasing decisions (i.e. buying items with less packaging), recycling, reusing or donating items, composting non-meat food scraps (your garden will thank you) and encouraging others to do the same.
Waste, and how we dispose of it, is forefront in many people's minds in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The county's contract with our landfill partner expires in a year and a half, and now there's competition — the proposed ReVenture Park incinerator. The pressure is on for our government leaders to make a decision, which is why we've tagged trashy news as something to watch in 2011.
Meanwhile, in England, people aren't sitting idly by while manufacturers attempt to lure buyers with overdone packaging meant to instill a sense of value or cleanliness. Here's more from The New York Times:
The citizens of Lincolnshire, England, were so fed up with the layers of plastic and cardboard and Styrofoam that encased their store purchases this fall that they took a high-priced, highly wrapped piece of meat to court.Specifically, the Lincolnshire County Council sued the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain for “excessive packaging” of its Taste the Difference Slow Matured Ultimate Beef Roasting Joint, which costs nearly $9 per pound, after receiving consumer complaints. No matter that the meat was a “luxury” item, the council said: the way it was packaged — plastic-wrapped atop a PET tray under a clear plastic cover and then swathed in a fetching cardboard sleeve — violated British law.
British regulations on excess packaging first took effect in 2003 in an effort to reduce waste, particularly items that cannot be recycled and go into a landfill. Those rules, strengthened two years ago in response to environmental concerns and an awareness that the nation’s landfills were reaching their limits, now require that producers keep packaging to the minimum required for “products’ safety, hygiene and consumer acceptance.”
That set off a nationwide experiment in rethinking how familiar products are sold, from Easter eggs to tubes of tomato paste to plastic jugs of fabric softener.
“I think it’s starting to affect purchasing decisions, but maybe not so much at this time of year,” said Andy Dawe, head of the retail division at the Waste Resources Action Program, or WRAP, a government-financed waste reduction project. “When people shop now, packaging is often the last thing on people’s mind. But that changes when they have to extract the toy from the layers and layers of plastic.”
Read the rest of this article, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, here.
Here's a speaker at the TEDx Great Pacific Garbage Patch event with a challenge to plastic manufacturers:
Rhiannon "Rhi" Bowman is an independent journalist who contributes snarky commentary on Creative Loafing's CLog blog four days a week in addition to writing for several other local media organizations. To learn more, click the links or follow Rhi on Twitter.
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