Over recent years there has been a significant drive to reduce packaging, save weight and improve shelf-life for products, all in the interest of reducing waste and related water and carbon impacts of the things we buy. Soups, coffee, snacks and other long-life products are increasingly moving away from jars and tins to lighter-weight, lower-carbon impact laminated packaging. We chirp "behold, the 98 percent reduction in packaging and the significant fuel savings in our complicated logistics" and rest for a moment on our laurels. But what does it mean? Problem solved? However, along with the intended consequences, there are those other, unintended ones: the migration from "recycling" to "rubbish" for the leftovers; the complex, lightweight, laminated packaging of a post-modern world where "skinny" is the buzzword: the use of increasingly scarce mineral and metal resources in ever more complex materials; new challenges for the resource management industry. These materials are sent to the bin of "less excess" to nestle alongside the toothpaste tubes and other last-century products that made the journey to Laminatesville, but which also need sorting.
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