The Independant's view on packaging

Campaign aims to reduce the mountains of waste

By Michael McCarthy, Martin Hickman and Geneviève Roberts
Published: 22 January 2007

The shrink-wrapped swede, bought from a London supermarket at the weekend, says it all. Why on earth add a skin to something that's got a tough enough skin of its own?

Wrapping that's entirely unnecessary is not confined to root vegetables: it's everywhere. And today The Independent launches a campaign to highlight how environmentally unfriendly, how problematic and - not least - how irritating the phenomenon of packaging and packaging waste has become.

We are asking readers to be at the forefront of it, to bring home to supermarkets and other major retailers how imperative is the need to slim down radically the avalanche of bags, trays, wrappers, boxes, parcels, cartons, cardboard, plastic, foil and clingfilm that is sweeping over our lives.

Packaging presents a problem for several reasons. Firstly, it uses up huge volumes of natural resources: oil for plastic trays, bags and wrappers; trees for paper, cartons, and cardboard; aluminium for tins and cans; glass for jars and bottles. About eight per cent of global oil production is used to make plastic, of which a quarter is thought to end up in packaging. Secondly, climate change is hastened by the greenhouse gas emissions from the energy used to make and transport the containers.

Thirdly, there is the problem of disposal. The packaging industry claims that, with the quadrupling of recycling rates in the past decade, 60 per cent of packaging is now recycled; but even so, it admits that five million tons of it is dumped in holes in the ground. The UK's landfill sites are filling up and finding new ones is a problem. In 2002, the Environment Agency warned that sites in the South-east would be full in seven years' time. New EU regulations require the UK to cut waste going to landfill by half by 2013, and to a quarter of the current level by 2020.

Fourthly, packaging itself is expensive and adds to retail prices. The Government's Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) says that families spend £470 on packaging each year, one-sixth of their food budget.

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