Sustainability: Let’s Not Buy Over-packaged Products

Here’s a great example of a pervasive trend in our consumer world: over-packaging. For a century or so, soap has come to us wrapped in a piece of paper that can be discarded or recycled, or perhaps a thin, light-duty cardboard box. Now, we have 7.5 ounces of liquid soap, sold in plastic bottles, each equipped with a pump that mixes the soap with air to form a pleasantly fragrant foam. The whole bottle-pump machine is disposable. In fact, even if you’re a reasonably eco-conscious consumer and wanted to re-use, CVS doesn’t even sell the soap in large bottles for those wishing to refill their pump bottles.

Of course, one can recycle the bottle, which means that it has to be transported, sorted, shredded, processed (separating the metal spring in the pump), melted, pelletized, and transported again. Wouldn’t it be better if it simply weren’t made in the first place? This, of course, is why “recycle” is at the end of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” triumvirate; while recycling plastics is better than landfilling them, it would be far better if the petroleum from which they were made could have stayed where it’s been for the last hundred million years — in the ground.

This is an extremely attractive product, from CVS’s position, insofar as it greatly increases consumer spending on soap. Instead of a 30-cent bar of soap, we have a $2 “soap system.” It has the additional virtue (from CVS’s perspective) of being used faster than bar soap. Thus, ethics are  required on CVS’s part if they are to refuse to make and sell this product — which, of course, is precisely what one might hope they’d do.

Since it’s clear that ethics didn’t win the day here, it looks like it’s up to us customers to refuse to participate in consumer practices like this that are clearly abusive to the environment. But what are our sensibilities in this area within our current generation?  That’s not a pretty story.

Yet we see this changing rapidly; in particular, the next generation of consumers has already begun to think this way.  Television programming for kids and school curricula in progressive regions has young people looking at the world of stuff around them and asking:

• Where did this come from?
• Who made it?
• Under what conditions?
• Do I really need it?
• What will happen to it after I’m finished with it?

This type of thinking will eventually render CVS’s lack of morals irrelevant. Over-packaged products will disappear simply because no one will buy them. I hope I’m still around to see the day.