To save the Earth from an environmental disaster, the change and reduction of products packaging is by far not enough alone, but it can give its contribution, if associated with other interventions to reduce the amount of wastes we produce and to recycle them as much as possible.

The packaging of commercial products are, in many cases, excessive and made with wrong materials, difficult or not convenient to be recycled.

Too many plastic, gum, metals are used simply to make well visible the product to be sold; the plastic could be replaced, in many cases by paper with various resistance or glass, the last matter especially for drinks, sauces, milk derivatives.

Then, the PVC, a chlorinated plastic material very difficult to be recycled and produced with polluting and dangerous industrial processes would be totally banned for every kind of product, either food or not and replaced, for ex., by PE (Polyethylene), at low and high density.

Another system to reduce plastic, glass, metallic bottles is that of reusing the containers for drinks, household detergents, solvents and milk many times filling them just in the shop or supermarket from great tanks containing the desired product and paying at the cash the volume of the liquid you have taken.
In this way, the lifespan of your bottle is nearly unlimited.
I know that in some supermarkets, this is already possible.

Then, we need to encourage the production and use of more bio-degradable plasticware, not from oil derivatives (ethylene, styrene, propylene,...) but from agriculture products; in commerce there are already plastic materials obtained from the working residuals of maize and other cereals.
Starch, cellulose and the vegetable fibers are the base materials for these products.

Then, I think that also the many colorants and dyes used for plastic packaging would be much reduced, because they can create further problem in the recycling process and also release toxic residuals to foods, especially to those containing alcohol and fats, that can extract more easily something from the plastic containers.

Of course, to achieve all these nature-friendly changes in products packaging, precise and severe laws should be approved and made respect; already within the EU, this is possible, but this has been made still too little to date, for the resistances opposed by the industrial lobbies and for the scarce average sensibility of politicians to this problem.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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