The fact that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to sort their waste and to try and minimise its impact on the environment in the first place is completely wrong to me.
Most people in urban areas rely on stores for basic survival, and the vast majority of products we buy there come with unnecessary waste. It doesn’t make any sense to then tell these people “by the way, you’d better clean up that mess when you’re done because it’s bad for the environment”. If governments were truly concerned or willing to act, this waste wouldn’t make it into our homes in the first place.
If a company wants to sell a product, they should be held accountable for the waste that comes along with it. They should have to prove that they can reuse the waste and be incentivised to reduce it. If they can’t, they can’t operate.
Ecocide laws need to become commonplace, and the consumer should not be responsible for their waste if they haven’t got legitimate alternative options. I understand this community is more willing to do their part in this regard, but I don’t think it’ll ever be feasible to expect this from the wider population. We need to stem the flow, not just handle the mess.
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.
Safe food packaging existed before non-biodegradable plastics.
I doubt hardly anyone remembers the Tylenol Murders, but that was a monster change in our mental consumer safety map. I was a child and watched grocery store packaging change overnight. Freaked me out as a kid to see such change vs. what had been normal before.
Suddenly everything was tamper resistant. If people stepped into a 1980 grocery store they would freak out, think it was sooo unsafe.
And while we’re at it, that was around the time idiots were protesting paper grocery sacks, as if the evil corporations were chopping down old-growth forests. So they won and we got plastic.
Who brought up plastics?
I think you misunderstood my point. Wasteful non-biodegradable, non-recyclable packaging is a relatively recent thing. Before plastics came along, food was packaged safely in variants of paper, glass, steel, and aluminum. There’s no reason we couldn’t go back to the pre-plastics way of doing things other than convenience and maximizing profit.
Also biodegradable plastics exist, but they aren’t used as much because they cost slightly more than the non-biodegradable ones and companies don’t want to lose those pennies with every sale. If there was a tax on non-biodegradable plastic for any use outside the medical field, it would probably fix this.
Are there any examples of such food safe/isolated products that you think are justified in being packaged with single use plastic?
That’s a bit of a leading question, as if I advocated for single use Plastic specifically.
I’m not a food health scientist so I’d leave it at: as a consumer I want whatever keeps people safe, and is of the least impactful material. Commonly that’s plastic, but as we see with glass bottles, options exist.
Apologies, I assumed you meant using waste, i.e. packaging materials that are not easily reused, to ensure food safety. Glass is great in comparison to plastic.
Soaps could be in large vats that you fill your own containers with.
Bread could be sold as is, but without the paper or plastic bag. Just put bare into shelves.
Produce could be sold mostly as is, but without the plastic and without the option to put it in a plastic bag from a roll.
Glass jar preserves could be sold as is, but with an expanded capacity for accepting glass jar returns from customers.
Meat could be sold from the butcher, only. Or ideally criminalized.
Candy could be in a wall of easy to open boxes and you use a scoop to put it in a paper bag.
It’s not hard to solve. It’s not even really hard to implement.
Not really the point of the post but sure, or directly relevant to my comment no contest with the options you laid out