Excessive packaging and being charged for our waste...

[CountessDracula]

Try unpacking anything with excessive packaging and giving it to the checkout people to dispose of.

Esp things like pears/apples etc that come 4 in a tray with a plastic top and then cling film on top.

Let them pay for the disposal, not us! It might even prompt them to re-think their packaging, you never know.

[SoupDragon]

Or buy items that are loose :)

[shazronnie]

Good idea!

When the cashier says "would you like any help with your packing?" ask for help unpacking!!

[trinityrhino]

i'm a litte bit inclined to do the 'taking off the pvkaging and giving it back to them ' thing

just for kicks

[CountessDracula]

Soupy I do buy loose stuff, but sometimes it is impossible. For eg I can only get organic pears in these packages in Waitrose which makes me , I moan about it every time!

[Whizzz]

I don't think they are thinking of charging for stuff that householders recycle - so you could still get cardboard boxes etc, but ensure that they are recycled rather than put in with general rubbish. I think the idea is to deter people from simply putting everything to landfill

[TooTicky]

But if you give it back to them they'll probably just bin it, whereas you could take it home and painstakingly recycle it...
Not sure the people who make the decisions actually get the message if you leave the packaging behind. Maybe better to combine with a letter-writing campaign.
Is there an national anti-packaging day?

[CountessDracula]

Our council don't recycle plastic

[SoupDragon]

I even object to the little plastic bags you have to put your stuff in to weigh it. I try to avoid using them.

[Whizzz]

I'm assuming that if the rubbish tax is launched, then councils will have to provide proper recycling facilities for all ??? But hey, that just might be too logical

[SoupDragon]

Ours doesn't either, CD. I take stuff like that into the junk modelling area at DSs school. At least it gets reused that way.

[CountessDracula]

Yes soupy that's a good idea

Though it still ends up in landfill etc

[throckenholt]

the very worst thing is to charge people for their waste - a large number of people will end up dumping it wherever they think they can get away with it.

Much better to make the supplier responsible - that way encourage reduction of packaging at source.

[Gloworm]

we are charged for waste, in ireland

not a problem for us, as i said on the other thread we recycle almost everything.

however lots of people dump their rubbish all other the countryside, in out of the way places where they seem to get away with it.

also some of the public waste bins in town are constantly filled with carrier bags of household rubbish. for this reason a few bins have been removed for the end of a council house road.
and there are no bins at the beach as they were also abused, overflowing with household rubbish, and surrounding ground covered in bags of rubbish too.

[cupcakes]

you used to be able to buy cardboard boxes of Persil to refill your plastic bottle. But now I have to constantly buy new bottles and accumulate hundreds of washballs.
It's really, really stupid.

[SaintGeorge]

Suppliers are charged for waste in a variety of ways.

Producers pay under the Waste Packaging Regulations which compares production of packaging against production of waste and a levy is charged accordingly. BUT there are sneaky ways around the legislation. Those who are good at it get allowances which they then sell to the companies who are bad at it - the allowances are cheaper to buy than the tax is to pay.

All businesses pay for waste disposal - and trust me it costs them more per tonne that in does an individual household. The more waste you force them to dispose of the better. When it hits them in their profits they might start paying more attention.

[DominiConnor]

Of course the big cost for suppliers is that packaging itself costs money.
There are smart people with maths degrees who do stuff like work out whether it's cheaper to use less packaging, or allow more goods to get trashed in transit.
You can shift this equilibrium a bit, but not much without doing more harm than good. A depressing % of goods are thrown away (with their packaging) because they didn't make it to the consumer 100% intact.

If you tax packaging too much, then you increase waste through more damaged goods.
The "perfectly ripe" stuff in Waitrose simply wouldn't make it to the shops unless you packaged it more than bog standard spuds.

Not saying you shouldn't tax a bit, but Le Chatelier will get you if you try too hard. Henri-Louis' work can cause Greens to quite literally froth at the mouth.

As for "pretty, but useless" packaging, there is certainly room for reduction in waste here big time.
But...
For many goods like cosmetics the packaging is already a high % of the manufacturing cost, and they spend because it gets more sales.
As I recall cosmetics packaging is the second largest consumer of gold.
So I think small taxes would simply have no effect on their behaviour.
Big taxes get political, and they'd probably accept higher costs than reduce sales anyway.

Consumers can have a big effect here, as long as they are properly informed, rather than being driven by mindless Green/BBC propaganda.

In Germany, the "recycling" measures were loved by many local manufacturers, which confused the Greens in government, and even now they still haven't realise that it's simply a neat protectionist measure.

[throckenholt]

but what about all those indivdually wrapped packages in a packet and then packaged together in pairs (etc). Especially things that are aimed at kids and lunchboxes.

[DominiConnor]

Individual wrappings in a larger bag are sometimes wasteful, sometimes not.
Food in bags is often filled with nitrogen which slows down decay and being dry stops them sticking together.
Open the bag, and it starts to go bad, so individual wrapper make sense environmentally, sometimes to prevent waste.

That I think is a core part of the problem.
A manufacturer who uses packaging to reduce waste may be penalised as much as one who does it through incompetence or greed.

Also, there is the tricky question of how you calculate the tax ?
Do you tax the volume or the resources consumed ?

Food wrappers are of course not ideal candidates for bio-degadable materials, and thus food may go up more than (say) cosmetics.

What is recyclable anyway ?
My local council tells us not to recycle packaging that has been used for food, presumably for health reasons. But glass can be bunged in the dishwasher.
Ironically the plastics revolution came about partly because there was a lot of oil based gunk lying around as a waste product of making petrol.

Also packaging like tins reduces the need for refrigeration which uses quite a bit of energy.

I don't know where you could go to find out whether the total impact of a piece of frozen tuna is less than from a tin.
Anyone else know ?

[TooTicky]

cupcakes, if you use environmentally friendly washing liquid, such as ecover, you may find local health food shops have a refill system.

[fullmoonfiend]

In Asda, I tried buying loose fruit and veg and when it came to ceckout she put it all in separate bags for me. When I explained I had chosen not to put them in bags as I didn't want the hassle of getting rid, she read me a lecture about ''healf and safety ishoos. What if someone was allergic to onions and their shopping got contaminated by your loose onion which had been on the conveyor belt...''

Thunk.....

[fullmoonfiend]

The worst cuplrits for excess packaging, in my opinion, are children's toys. The unwrapped article measures around 5 inches, yet the wrappings have filled an entire bin bag..WTF! :)

[theinvisiblegirl]

Surely you can just avoid the packaging by not buying it? If you buy locally, use local veg box schemes etc etc, then you don't get all the packaging (and will probably reduce the food miles of your food as well).

I get sooo mad when I go to supermarkets when I see their need to package everything. And as for bags of salad....why?? Why not encourage local farmers to provide daily stock? (Probably too expensive, they wouldn't be able to have such a huge profit margin).

The other option of course is to grow your own! You don't need an allotment or a huge garden to be able to grow your own ... salad can be grown even in a window box. And once you taste your own home grown stuff you will NEVER want to go back to the crap they sell in the puffed up bags.

Quite like the idea of unpacking everything and giving it ti the cashier though...although it probably will just end up in landfill. Maybe if people start getting charged for their refuse and therefore have to think about what they are buying the supermarkets might realise and reduce it....you never know....stranger things have happened!

[DominiConnor]

I'm with fullmoonfiend, they are the worst by far, and with lots of ties and other stuff to make them very hard to open.

As for supermarket margins, they're just not big enough to affect much in this context.
In any case it's not margins, it's volumes that make local farmers inpracticable, and of course almost none of us live in places where local produce is a major factor in what we eat. We buy stuff from farmers markets, some of which bring produce that's not even from the same country.

Supermarkets lurrrve high margin "environmental/organic/fairtrade" products. The model many use is that the product "rents" shelf space. Fairtrade coffee being more expensive makes more money even on the same volume of sales and occupying the same shelf area.
If they were the monopolies the Guardian would have you believe they'd stock only organic fairtrade coffee. They'd make twice as much money.

But of course the Greens and BBC haven't yet worked out that their campaign against shipping food from a long distance away is really bad for FairTrade.
Ironically it can work rather well for Nestle, who as we all know are one of the vilest multinationals on the planet.

[koalabear]

Californifrau - we are in San Francisco, and the recycling is fantastic - basically, we have a collection every two weeks for everything you could possible recycle (free of charge), and then you pay for the size of bin for "other waste" - so effectively, the incentive is to recycle as much as possible and limit the size of bin for other stuff which you have to pay for - we have managed to "down size" our bin as we work recycle more and more

is quite addictive ..... very weird