I remember just after the Gorbachev era, or maybe in the middle of it, Western good in their bright packages hit the shops of Russia and people bought the bright, polished goods and found, to their horror, the bread and the alcohol were not as tasty as their own, dully-wrapped traditional fare. They learned a very quick lesson which people in the West have long forgotten: packaging hides inferiority.
And it runs throughout the system. Having assiduously recycled for years my friend’s husband who happens to be a chemist, tells me he doesn’t recycle plastic supermarket bags. He tells me the energy required to run the diesel trucks that pick up the recycling bags in London is so enormous is completely defeats the purpose. The ideal would be not to create the plastic bags in the first place.
And with two factories opening up in the UK to take mixed plastics and my local company refusing to take them, one does wonder what on Earth we are thinking, if we are thinking at all. We are simply not serious enough about this whole packaging industry which is so intimately tied up with marketing and therefore, with profits.
If people started to leave the packaging in the shops and just walk out with their paid goods, things might change.