Overpackaging – are shoppers or supermarkets to blame?

This all depends on use the package is being used for – I hate broken food items due insecure packaging. Most are slightly over -engineered and far too many are in plastic containers – whereas cardboard would be a more sustainable material.

My real pet hate are Wilkinson’s dog biscuit bones – because they are invariably broken inside the box as it is too thin – the dogs love the taste I hate the breaks.

Agreed with the above

What needs to be done is for all councils to provide bins to recycle it all. Where I live in St Albans, we have to take half of our recycling to “centres” because the local bins aren’t allowed to accept card!

Card? surely one of the easiest materials to recycle and they can’t recycle it?

In comparison in Rugby, there is 1 green bin for garden waste, a blue bin for ALL things recyclable and a black bin for everything else. This works fantastically well.

If the all councils pulled their finger out, it wouldn’t be such a faff. We pay for recycling, but some think that we still have to put ourselves out.

Have add my council has just added a recycle waste bin instead of plastic bags – Now we can recycle plastic bottles and cardboard

Have a look at the boxes of fruit and veg next time you are in a supermarket. You may notice, in some supermarkets at least, that they are all in identical cardboard boxes. The reason? The boxes from the producers are apparently discarded in favour of ‘standard’ boxes fitting the supermarket’s own corporate look when the produce reaches the packaging/distribution warehouse in the UK. Perfectly good boxes are discarded (re-cycled but needlessly so) and the produce placed into identically sized boxes (to fit the allotted space on the supermarket shelves) with a uniform appearance provided by the supermarket. At my local plant I am advised that a whole building is dedicated to dealing with this unnecessary process and the amount of waste is staggering. Do we really care whether we buy produce out of an original producer’s cardboard box or one designed by our supermarket of choice? I doubt anyone really notices. Yes, let’s encourage supermarkets to cut back on the visible packaging that we see on the shelves but let’s not forget the backroom waste problem too.

With 40 years experience of the packaging industry I have sympathy with the overpackaging view but do see things for the other side.

The consumer usually gets the packaging they demand. Nothing stale or broken. Long shelf life. The consumer doesn’t go shopping everyday as they did 50 years ago. We want exotic products from around the world 365 days of the year. All of these demands create technical demands on the the packaging and in some cases apparent overpackaging.

Some packs appear to be two thirds full. This is settlement as the product is packed at high speed, and this introduces air to the mix. Make the pack with no headroom and it will be cheaper packing and less of it but at a much higher price as the labour intensity of making that form of pack.

One single type of plastic is not viable as it would have to be the best performing material, a catch all material that would cost a lot and be the least recyclable of all specifications due to its construction.

If only it was as simplistic as “let’s have one material”. Paper bags at the Home and Colonial are days long gone!

In fairness to the manufacturers, items like the printer cartridge and Dr Who screwdriver featured at the head of the article have a relatively high value-to-volume factor, and as such would be much more easily pocketable if supplied in minimum packaging. In these cases surely a certain amount of extra material to act as a deterrent to shoplifting is excusable, isn’t it?

As a packaging developer myself I sometimes pull my hair out at some of the packs I see on supermarket shelves. Today I purchased some Tesco Finest Italian Gianduiotti chocolates to share with colleagues on my birthday next week, imagine my surprise when I got them home and was putting them in my work bag to discover that there was only about 15 individually wrapped chocolates and that the bag could quite easily hold a lot more especially if the air inflating the bag was either removed or reduced.
From 29 years of experience in packaging I can tell you that whoever designed this pack knew very little about sizing packs for products. I suspect that the co-packer gave Tesco a bag size and said “fit your product in this standard bag”.
I would argue that this pack is either underfilled to meet a price point or grossly oversized a point I would argue with anyone from Tesco and win.

In the June edition of which there is a letter (page 81) by Alice Lawhead regarding M&S and some boxes she collected from the back of store for her sons move. Her comment was that the strength of boxes was out of proportion to the contents. I think this comment typifies the lack of understanding by the consumer of why that box appears to be so strong. The boxes contained meringues and tea cakes, both of which would be easily damaged in transit. Those boxes would have not been transported individually but palletised, so the box at the bottom of the pallet may easily have had over 100Kgs on top of it and had to endure the stresses of being transported by truck. The manufacturer will have had to use a certain specification of board grade to allow the products to survive without any damage, as that would not be tolerated by the consumer or M&S.

I have worked in packaging development for over 20 years mainly in the food industry. The whole over packaging debate over food seriously annoys me as a lot of day to day items are effectively packaged, and I think that the packaging industry trade bodies are doing a seriously bad job at representing the way some packaging is how it is and the benefits it actually brings to the consumer and the effect it has on reducing food waste.

some of the overpackaging is related to “offers”, such as cardboard sleeve for three tins of sweetcorn or a plastic cover for four cans of baked beans. If the consumer rejects the overpackaging, then they pay more for the product. Whilst it may be sensible to have containment packages for 12 packs of beer for transportation, up to four cans of something can easily be packed with the normal shopping and the supermarket could give the discount for bulk buy at the till. In fact, they could have a sliding scale of discounts to suit purchasers of different quantities.

What really gets to me is the large number of M&S products that are packed in bags or boxes with the label ‘Not currently recyclable’. Why on earth don’t they choose wrappings (plastics or otherwise) that are recyclable! Our kerbside collection takes paper, cardboard, clean plastics such as yogurt cartons, milk & juice bottles, etc. It’s really annoying to have to send perfectly good wrappings to landfill. Why do M&S insist in using expanded polystyrene and other non-recyclable for their ‘perfectly ripe’ pears, for instance? You don’t appear to be able to buy these items loose, so I’m happy to take them packed in 4s as they are, at least, edible!

Not strictly about supermarket packaging, but packaging of products sold in supermarkets. There is an increasing trend for instant coffee to be sold in refill packs, one of which claims it only uses 3% of the plastic that would be used even in the lid of a regular jar. So there is economy for the manufacturers not only in paying for less packaging, but also the saving on transport costs for plastic bags of coffee that weigh only a quarter of the equivalent jars. This is all very good, of course, BUT why don’t these economies get passed on passed on to the consumer? The refill packs are invariably dearer per 100g than the jars, which suggests quite strongly that manufacturers are relying on consumers to be “eco-friendly”, and then making them pay over the odds for their principles – and that’s pretty cynical in my book.

I am in agreement and in favour of more recycling, composting and light weighting packaging, using fewer natural non-replaceable resources. We must not get fogged by the PR and forget the facts that is all. Look deeper. The price – marketing yes but again is the pack and manufacturing and packing process cheaper – it may be more eco friendly but that does not make it cheaper.

Why are 500g of Battered or Breaded Fish steaks Boxes so big they could easily put in 750g or reduce the box size it wastes Freezer space in shop and home Freezers it would make sense to put in
750g in current 500g boxes and sell 500g in smaller boxes simples!.

Speed usually. You need to get the frozen fish in the box fast and the only way is roomy boxes. Don’t like it then buy fresh fish!

If you look at fish fingers they are a uniform size, so a box can be developed to fit exactly round them as the size will never change.

Fish fillets vary so you require a box that can accomoate those varying sizes.

I recently bought Market Deli chips. The crisps (chips are what you have with a fish), are nice enough, but the bag is MASSIVELY oversized for the amount of crisps you get. I’d say between 2/3 and 3/4 empty – fresh air. I dislike this as it’s very wasteful, and a deliberate attempt to make you think you are getting more than you really are. We get thinner and thinner bags at the checkout, yet companies are using more and more unnessesary packaging. I won’t be buying again.