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Have you stopped to think about the amount of garbage we generate every day? And how much of that waste consists simply of packaging of various types of all kinds of products, in many cases of materials such as plastic, plasticized cardboard or many others that we tend to tend not to recycle? The average American generates two kilos of garbage a day, and it is estimated that around 30% of it comes from packaging. A good part of it, which is not usually separated as paper, cardboard, glass or organic, does not have recycling protocols, and ends up in landfills.
Historically, the packaging of most of the products we consume has been designed to optimize its logistics, stacking or boxing, or simply to make it attractive, for aesthetic or design reasons. In some industries, such as cosmetics or soft drinks and bottled water, there is talk of an authentic “addiction to packaging” to make their products stand out in the shelves. The large distribution and electronic commerce are also responsible for excessive use of plastics in their packaging protocols, which end up in many cases converted into non-recyclable waste.
More and more brands are launching initiatives to reduce their use of plastics as much as possible. Some reuse plastic from the ocean, others sell through channels that reduce packaging to the absolute minimum, others, like Amazon, work with brands to package their products in a way that combines greater sustainability with an optimization of logistics, while others redesign their products to present them in more recyclable containers, like this toothpaste in pills.
Now, a coordinated action that includes a large number of consumer brands such as Procter & Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, etc. aims to launch a circular platform, Loop, which would allow consumers, initially in the United States and France, to receive their products at home in reusable packaging, which we would deposit in a specially designed box as we finished its contents, to then ask a logistics operator to pick it up—or leave it at a collection point—and have those containers redistributed to their manufacturers, who would clean and reuse them up to a hundred times.
The idea has some very interesting elements: firstly, it benefits from the possibility of using logistic systems based on return, which would allow designing routes capable of optimizing the capacity of delivery vehicles both on the way out and on the return to the warehouse. Second, they encourage brands to redesign their packaging to make it more attractive or more functional (such as ice cream containers that keep the product cold longer, for example), as well as promoting a subscription model in which users ask again the same products that have been used previously, which may lead to an improvement in consumer loyalty.
The price of the products would be similar to those of those packaged in a conventional manner, to which an extra deposit would be added for the first container, but which is returned when it is returned, following the traditional model that exists with many products in some countries. .
Without a doubt, it is a very interesting initiative. The following is encourage users not only want to use these formulas to carry out an ecologically responsible consumption, but also tend to favor with his election to the brands participating in the scheme to make others join to the. Much of the success of such actions is at the reception from consumers and the fact that they understand that sacrificing the convenience of being able to pull comfortably away everything they want for certainly more cumbersome formulas, but with a Ecologically lesser footprint is, as such, a good idea. Or, every day more, the only viable idea.
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This post was previously published on www.enriquedans.com and is republished here with permission from the author. Check out Enrique’s book “Everything Is Going to Change.”
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
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