Eco-friendly packaging is gaining more and more traction as consumers choose to vote with their wallets. Avoiding plastic bags and using re-usable ones has become common practice.
Packaging and the waste it generates have been major environmental issues for decades. The new forms of eco-friendly packaging are now considered best practice by environmentalists and businesses alike. Ironically, given the public myth of business and environmental interests being at diametric opposites, business has been just as much a driver behind change as the Green movement.
Consumers don’t mind, either. The fact is that packaging products like paper bags and the ubiquitous Green shopping bags have been huge successes in the consumer market. The new bags are so popular that people have their own collections of these very useful containers for anything and everything.
The business perspective on eco-friendly packaging
As usual, the image of the business view of environmental issues is appallingly simplistic, and in many cases, simply 100% wrong. It’s worth looking at the history of the introduction of the new packaging to see a more accurate version of the issues:
Business never opposed environmentally friendly packaging “on principle”-
The real issue was the cost of tooling up and phasing out the old packaging. There was a question of significant costs to business initially, about 20 years ago. The packaging systems of the time were providing millions of units of packaging per day, and the sheer quantity of packaging, several million dollars daily, made businesses naturally a bit nervous about the cost of changing their packaging strategies. A combination of new technology and excellent cost bases for the eco-friendly products solved those issues quite convincingly.
Business isn’t “ideologically opposed” to environmentally friendly packaging products-
The truth is quite the opposite. Many businesses only use these products for ethical reasons, and progressively stronger demand for them is coming from businesses. This really is an inexcusable misrepresentation of basic facts.
Not all plastic products are bad-
The old plastics used to be a big issue in many industries, but that’s now changed. The old plastic products are being phased out rapidly and replaced with new compounds which don’t have their drawbacks. A notable case is the new type of fully biodegradable plastic shopping bags, which are broken down by air and sunlight.
The real environmental effects of eco-friendly packaging
The benefits of the new types of packaging are:
• Drastically reduced volumes of waste- This saves every community in the world a fortune in waste disposal. Recycling and easily biodegraded products are transforming what used to be a truly dangerous environmental menace into a much more manageable and sustainable process.
• Reduced pollution- The practices of storing and burning packaging produced various forms of pollution. The lower volumes of waste, again, are systematically reducing the related pollution issues.
• Community cost- Simply paying for waste products to be removed is expensive. Recyclable products are progressively eliminating these costs and reducing the problems to more manageable levels. • Industry issues- Even storing the old types of packaging came at a cost to industry. Storing the old PVC products, for example, was risky and counterproductive because these products deteriorated in storage and gave off toxic fumes. New packaging is much safer and easier to store for long periods in modern shelving systems and auto picking systems.
Eco-friendly packaging has been a winner across the board for consumers, businesses and commerce. This really is the way of the future.
WORD FROM THE SPONSOR
God strengthens us and rescues us.
2 Timothy 4:17-18
