The crusade against plastic packaging is self-defeating and not helping the environment

Another of these fairy tales is spinning for souls eager for ecological salvation according to which in all this post-war period packaging has grown enormously due to a kind of perverse and unjustified will of the sellers of goods. As if packaging weren’t also a cost and as such to be reduced rather than increased, if only for reasons of competitiveness and competition. Of course, in the post-war peasant world, packaging did not exist, just as waste did not exist except in small quantities. Agriculture was all organic and the hens recycled what was left over. Then luckily growth came and with it prosperity and cities exploded. In 1950, half of the population was employed in agriculture. Today less than 5 percent and produces the same amount of goods with much better quality. What does the packaging have to do with it? The packaging industry has accompanied this growth, it has evolved, it has always used new materials. Pursuing various objectives: protection of goods, safety in transport, conservation of food, hygiene, consumer comfort. Of course, even the one that is not a sin to be punished. For urban families, a blessing: they stopped having to go to the store every day to buy exactly what they needed, under penalty of deterioration of the purchased goods, and together with the good they buy the protection of the same and its conservation. Then there is someone who exaggerates and the need to embellish the product, to make it “sexy”, adds perhaps a useless part to the packaging. But as we said at the beginning, packaging is essentially a cost and as such it usually has precise justifications. Are we sure that a returnable vacuum cleaner, for example, is more convenient than a disposable vacuum cleaner in terms of time, convenience, organization? Is rewashing all the dishes in fast food restaurants healthier and more energetically convenient than disposable cups, perhaps made with recycled materials? That disposable packaging, as we saw during Covid, is a waste tout court rather than an optimization of dosages? My mini-dose tray of raw ham prevents me from throwing away the part that perishes every time. And I’m not sure that the farmer’s cat didn’t pee on the wholesale and zero km salad. We all love to order on Amazon, but without suitable packaging, goods of all kinds would never arrive intact at our house. Of course, packaging produces waste. But in the meantime Italy has learned to recycle a large part of it and many producers now use recycled materials, they are perhaps the main users. Always the producers then, let’s remember the cost, try in every way to save on the necessary materials. Do we therefore need a European regulation which, instead of encouraging recycling and saving materials in broad terms, tells us exactly which packaging we are authorized to use and how? By the way, I would like to understand how did we get into the situation where Europe decides via a successive series of Gosplans what cars we can drive, how we should keep warm and how we can transport our goods. While the rest of the world looks at us with amusement and occupies all the spaces left free by us. One last fact. By how much will we reduce European CO2 emissions if we pursue all the objectives of the Regulation? A few percentage points of our total emissions, which in turn account for 9 percent of global emissions. That is, zero point something.