When the packaging is greater than the content we eat

No, it's not a magic formula, it's not even three numbers to play in the lotto, it's not even a chemical formula. 21-100-3 represents a banal food packaging that we find on store shelves and that we buy, without thinking too much, for our food needs.

Micro portions of jam (to give an example), in small trays enclosed in a cardboard blister and wrapped in a transparent film, designed for hotles or for those who consume very small quantities of jam per meal, even if continuously during the month .

21 represents the weight in grams of the various packages that make up the salable package, 100 represents the jam content, divided into four packs of 25 gr. one and 3 are the different materials that must be disposed of.

So, compared to 100 grams of net product, the packaging, by weight, represents more than 20% with the difficulty of having to divide a part in the paper , a part in the plastic and a part in the undifferentiated.

It is definitely not an indictment against jam manufacturers, as they have only put into production an article requested by the market, but it is a fairly clear example how we can complicate our lives, from the point of view of the consumption of raw materials destined for packaging and how it is counterproductive, in order to reduce waste, to support this type of packaging.

The market is nothing more than the meeting between supply and demand and, if in this case, as in many others, consumers require production facilities to packaging that are completely against the logic of reducing the production of unnecessary waste, we can only get angry with ourselves.

The containment of waste also passes from the awareness that every consumer should have of the production chain and that of waste and recycling, thinking that each purchase corresponds to generation of a waste, which can be recycled with non-negligible costs, but which at times may not be possible to do so.

Buying a product for daily consumption should follow a circular and environmental logic, which relates the general incidence of its refusal with the product to be consumed .

You don't need to have a technical knowledge of production systems or recycling or the carbon footprint that each jar of jam creates once consumed, but we should have constant attention good rules on the choice of products and their packaging.

This means favoring refillable packaging, regulating one's monthly consumption of a product with packages that are the most suitable not to replicate small but numerous packages, reducing the consumption of items whose packaging could be reused but in reality it becomes waste when its content is exhausted.

If we are sensitive to the increase in non-recycled waste in the world, we too do our part.

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Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.