zerowaste

Sometime in the past year or so I started wondering aloud about the amount of paper and plastic packaging that was thrown into bins by the checkout in my local supermarket. Pretty much any outer wrapper or carton that would have an inner sealed bag/box.

I genuinely didn't understand what was going on, as I never saw other customers unpack and discard all this. A kind mastodon user then told me about a movement to put the burden of excessive packaging back on the shop rather than consumers:

By unpacking double packaged goods and discarding the outer box/wrapper in the supermarket's bins, these shoppers make visible to the staff and (ideally) owner that this is superfluous and unwanted materials, and BTW you get to throw it out now.

I haven't managed to track down any other information about this sort of everyday activism, but I think it's an appealing way to protest the amount of waste going into our homes on a daily basis.

Completely agree.

But I also think if you have the priviledge to be able to minimise waste yourself, you should definitely do it.

We need packaging minimisation legislation that requires manufacturers to minimise packaging to an absolute minimum both in terms of sheer volume but also in terms of material complexity meaning no gluing together plastic and paper or fused metal plastic wrapping where it is not needed. And finally minimising the packaging also inadvertently means you cannot make bottles weird shapes to fool you into thinkng the bottle is bigger than it actually is, because that means unnecessary material was wasted

I often wish grocery stores where like in the seventies but with just more options food wise. Almost no plastic and paper bags when you leave (although reusable is still better although im not sure how big a deal they would be nowadays since we use so much less paper.)

I'm all for packaging minimization but I also acknowledge that if I, the consumer seek single serving products, I'm pretty glad they are food safe and isolated. This is the part where "reduce" in the recycling slogan can manifest: what's the absolute minimum packaging needed to keep a consumer safe?

I'm not saying companies shouldn't ever be responsible for their packaging waste, it's a good idea. But I think municipal trash is meant to be that answer, in that rather than every company managing their own streams of returns, the locality does it, and sorts them by general type for efficiency/efficacy.

Therefore I think it best to factor waste costs from the company into that centralized system, so efficiencies of scale can manifest. This allows for better oversight and lower overall costs. The game is not allowing companies to be absent from this stage.

With acknowledgment that increased costs would land on the consumer one way or another, I'd conclude by saying centralized waste management needs to be better funded, and more sophisticated recycle/reuse systems implemented with those new funds.

I think the simple way to accomplish what you're saying is to require all manufacturers and distributors to put significant deposits on their packaging. It would force them to take back their packaging for reuse or proper disposal. I would want such a measure to be paired with standardization of all packaging. There should only be one type of container for each set of similar products.

You have gotten one fundamental thing wrong though: if you look at the actual bill of material for most supermarket items it is often not the part that you think you are buying that costs the most, and it is certainly not the part that makes the most profit. In reality what you are being sold is the packaging and what comes inside is more of an annoying but necessary expense for most companies.

Retiring plastic packaging (e.g. blister packs) wherever possible in favor of cardboard or other biodegradable alternatives would be a huge step in the right direction. The amount of plastic waste from basic things that don't require it is pretty ridiculous. There's no reason that a tool (for example) needs to be packaged in plastic. It doesn't even need packaging in the first place in most cases.

Imagine if you could go to the store with reusable containers and fill them up with foodstuffs. I eat a lot of beans, I could just fill up a bunch of sacks or cannisters at a dispensary rather than buy all these cans and bags. Need soap? Just go to the soap dispensary and fill up a jug. Etc. Etc.