In advance of the number one gift-giving time of year, keep your eye out for a curious phenomenon: a pile of wrapped gifts on Christmas morning or just prior to Hanukkah that might stand two feet tall or higher and just as wide. Once the gifts are unwrapped and taken out of their packages, however, the pile will likely shrink by about 80 percent.

Here’s a familiar scenario, particularly if you have children: the post gift-opening cursing, swearing and even blood-letting that comes with wrestling open rigid plastic packaging nine times larger than the product itself. You usually wind up resorting to a kitchen knife, razor blade or box knife only after you’ve opened up a couple of veins down the sides of your fingers trying to squeeze apart a thermoformed plastic clam shell that would appear to be made of petroleum-based kryptonite. After you finally wrestle the industrial strength plastic clam shell open, then you’ll need to run the gamut of a multitude of tiny, hidden plastic and steel twist-ties that hold the product in place inside the clam shell, simultaneously pitying the underpaid Chinese worker whose crappy job it is to twist nine thousand little ties into place during a 10-hour shift.

As humankind’s industrial and technological capabilities have broadened and expanded, so too have the mounds of multi-layered, complicated packaging to accompany the things we buy. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that about one-third of everything that finds its way into landfills is packaging. What this means is that each American is personally responsible for sending about 800 pounds of packaging into landfills each year, with the holidays from Thanksgiving until the end of December representing the pinnacle of tossed out packaging. The EPA estimates that the average household’s landfill-diverted trash spikes by about 25 percent during the holidays.

While it would be nice to pretend that we can go back to an era of 100 years ago when most household items weren’t packaged in much more than square of newspaper, if at all, it’s just not possible. As products are shipped from further and further away, with more hands on them at each step, some product packaging is, of course, a consumer safety issue. It keeps goods from breaking, spoiling or otherwise becoming contaminated, and it protects products from tampering. (Though the 1982 poisoning deaths of seven people in the Chicago area via tainted bottles of Tylenol is nearly 30 years in the past, it still looms large in the public psyche.) As a result, the need for what the industry calls “tamper-evident” packaging is never going to go away.

Packaging overkill for marketing purposes, however, is fair game for pressure from green-minded consumers and green lobbying. Products are put into oversized packaging for a number of reasons: to make for more marketing and logo promotion real-estate on a small product; to prevent shoplifting losses of small, high-ticket items that could be easily concealed under a coat without the two-foot wide plastic clam shell surrounding it, and to make hanging products on store wall displays easier.

Luxury brands are also guilty of packaging over-kill: for good reason. If you’re going to charge $235 for one-fifth of an ounce of “miracle” under eye cream that in reality cost 17 cents’ worth of ordinary ingredients to manufacture, you had better successfully mess with your target market’s psychological processes to the point where they are utterly convinced that your product is worth the shocking price tag. The best ways to do that, of course, involve marketing and packaging. Few people will ever be convinced that a little squirt of cosmetic in a tiny and simple recycled plastic bottle tucked inside an equally tiny and plain recycled paperboard box is worth half a week’s salary. Put it into a mysterious-looking, oddly shaped jewel-toned bottle, sink it inside an oversized box and wrap it with exotic, shiny colored film with flashy lettering, and you’re onto something. You’ve just sold hope and intrigue in a bottle…at a 1,300 percent markup.

The psychology of packaging is the subject of an interesting new law – and lawsuit – in Australia. That nation’s Parliament has passed a law that now prevents tobacco companies from selling cigarettes in distinctive packaging: no more logos, no lantern-jawed Marlboro men, no Turkish camels. Instead, as of the first of December, cigarettes can now be sold only in plain, olive-drab boxes with the brand’s name in a tiny and uniform font, with the added bonus of images of body parts damaged by tobacco-related diseases. Essentially, the Australian government has robbed tobacco companies from glamming up their dangerous product with sexy marketing, forcibly turning cigarettes into a commodity. Predictably, at least one tobacco company – British American Tobacco – has vowed to fight the new laws in court, alleging that the new law violates intellectual property rights.

While many companies still seem to be scaling up the complexity and toxicity of their packaging, some are trying to go in the opposite direction. Greener, more minimal packaging isn’t only about making consumers feel better. It’s also about hitting corporate sustainability goals and saving on shipping: a product with packaging that outweighs it three times over is not going to be cheap or easy to ship, and many companies would like to be able to reduce weight and pack more product into less space, which means more streamlined designs and fewer materials.

The numbers in sustainable packaging are robust: one recent report has concluded that the market for sustainable and green packaging will total $107.7 billion in 2011, and that number is expected to grow exponentially. There are a number of reasons for this. For starters, consumer demand for friendlier packaging is getting stronger, as is pressure from municipalities and internal corporate sustainability guidelines. Second, manufacturers and distributors are beginning to get an inkling of how much money they could save with more streamlined packaging. As international and domestic shipping costs increase due to a number of factors – higher fuel costs, piracy risks to cargo ships in some international waters, higher tariffs and inflation are all factors – more consumer product companies are looking for ways to radically cut down their transport costs, and sending out lighter, smaller packages is an effective way to do so.

Just scaling down the amount of materials, however, may not be sufficient. While many manufacturers have tried to keep product bulk and shipping weight down by simply shrink-wrapping products tightly rather than putting them into over-sized boxes or clam shells, the shrink wrap film itself is something of an ecological problem. More complicated than it looks, these flexible packaging films are often multi-layered and made of different materials in order to attain the right mix of breakage protection, thermal protection, and foiling and dyeing to attain an attractive appearance. The result is a product too impure and adulterated to recycle.

In the end, shrink-wrapping as it exists today is not only not very green, it’s about two percent, or six million tons, of the municipal solid waste junked in the U.S. each year, according to Plastics Today. About 10 percent of this flexible film is ultimately burned at waste-to-energy plants, with the remaining five and a half million tons finding its way into landfills, where it will likely sit for the better part of a millennium.

In an effort to meet the needs of companies seeking more green packaging (not to mention meet the needs of government mandates like those in the EU that have steadily increased the percentage of packaging that must be recyclable), some companies have begun experimenting with taking biodegradable cellulose-based plastics and making them sexier, with foils and colors, so they’re not quite so…well, cellulose.

The aluminum industry has also stepped forward, touting its product as a better alternative to plastic shrink-wrapping. Aluminum is lightweight, easy to form to packaging shapes, recyclable and a natural barrier to light, gases and moisture to protect product integrity and extend product life spans. And because of the high heat used to produce sheet aluminum, it comes naturally sterile. (Though the high heat and energy intensity required for production may also keep it from being truly green.) It’s also naturally pretty and shiny and will easily take the kind of sexy, printed graphics consumers are accustomed to. Aluminum also has an unprecedented green packaging reputation: aluminum drinking containers – soda, beer and juice cans – are easily recognized by the public as the most recycled packaging in the world.

The packaging industry is unlikely to change itself in a vacuum, however, and will require outside influences to do much more than tinker half-heartedly with greener packaging options.

The best and most unexpected ally in the war on wasteful and frustrating packaging, however, may be the retailers themselves. This holiday season, two mega-retailers – Amazon.com and WalMart – are pushing to reduced what’s commonly called “wrap rage” in the retail industry. The two companies, which separately have a lot of clout with manufacturers but together are a force to be reckoned with, are asking retailers to begin doing away with excessive and anger-inducing packaging.

Wal-Mart, for its part, has pledged that by 2013, it will reduce packaging by five percent compared with 2008 levels. While five percent may not sound like a lot, for the world’s largest retailer, this will translate to savings of about $3.4 billion annually in monetary costs and tons of material that would otherwise wind up in landfills. For Amazon, it’s not only about saving cash, it’s about giving consumers what they want.

“We’ve gotten e-mails from customers who’ve purchased scissors in a clam shell, which would require another pair of scissors to open the

The ultimate irony? Tools to cut through plastic clam shells...packaged in plastic clam shells. Source: Fast Company

package,” Nadia Shouraboura, Amazon’s VP of global fulfillment, told Bloomberg in an interview.

Amazon calls its campaign the “Frustration-Free Packaging” initiative (“Reducing Wrap Rage Since 2008”). The online retailer maintains a virtual shopping mall of gift products from companies that have pledged to reduce the amount of wasteful and difficult packaging they use in their products. Among the companies in the Frustration-Free Packaging gallery are Fisher-Price, Philips/Norelco, Mattel, Microsoft and electronics manufacturer Transcend.

Amazon reports that its quest to get more manufacturers to sign up for the frustration-free packaging initiative is ongoing. One tactic they are using is to make toy and consumer goods companies understand how angry customer are with a lot of modern packaging by bringing negative customer feedback directly to the manufacturers, according to a New York Times article from two years ago, when Amazon first launched its initiative. It has become increasingly difficult for manufacturers and distributors to ignore the fact that a switch to more streamlined, consumer-friendly packaging has led, in some cases, to a 73 percent drop in negative feedback on Amazon’s customer rating boards.

There’s a reason that Amazon is a trailblazer in inducing manufacturers to reduce unnecessary packaging. Many of the reasons for oversized, overkill packaging disappear when products are purchased online: there is no series of middlemen distributors, no risk of shoplifting since products are delivered to a customer’s door already paid for, and no need for glossy graphics and marketing on the box, since the purchase decision is made by the consumer on a Web site and not while standing in a store aisle. Finally, the products are in less danger of tampering, since they do not sit on a store shelf waiting for the nearest criminally homicidal maniac to come by with a syringe full of rat poison or acid.

Aside from practical and commercial inducements to reduce packaging, public pressure from green organizations to appeal to consumers’ desire to create less waste and feel better about their annual overindulgence in gifting would appear to work, as well. Greenpeace has done its part this holiday season: the activist group has has challenged a number of toy companies, including Hasbro, Mattel, Lego Group and Walt Disney to cease using packaging derived from increasingly plundered rain forests in Indonesia. Greenpeace’s challenge has gotten some traction: in response to the demand, all four toy companies have pledged to change some of their packaging practices.

The pledges may be too late to help you out on Christmas morning this year, but in the near future, you just might be able to finish the annual present-opening frenzy minus the use of knives and other sharp implements, the nervous breakdown, the box of bandages to cover the half-dozen bleeding wounds on your hands and the overflowing trash can full of plastic and Styrofoam peanuts. How jolly!

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

7 Responses to “‘Tis The Season To Wrestle With Wasteful, Frustrating Packaging”