The single serving. It calls to you from ketchup packets and coffee creamer cups. Break the seal. Pour out the contents. Toss in the trash. Phew. You have just overcome the American habit of hoarding. You used a single-serving item and threw it away without regret. And why not?
The single-serving item is not like your favorite pair of sneakers or your grandfather’s pocket watch. It betrays nothing of your past, exposing little more than your desires the moment you ripped open the package. As an accessory to your daily routine, what value do these packets of convenience hold? Within the question lies the answer: convenience.
The trade-off of a moment’s convenience for grand-scale detriment to global stability is not, however, particularly convenient. From Ziploc bags to cardboard coffee cups, plastic-wrapped heads of broccoli to sandwiches bundled in foil, there are many ways we plow through our limited resources, mounding up landfills. One-time-use items smudge the environment by way of 800 pounds thrown away per person annually. To keep containers and packaging materials moving, 500 million new transport palettes are built each year — enough wood to frame 300,000 houses.
Yet, single-use packages are advantageous for the on-the-go human building a career. It takes time and planning to leave the house with a reusable cup or a multi-purpose container. So, how do we strike a balance between self-made success and the greater good? Recalibrating our measure of success would serve to conjoin the two ideas into one.
Future inventors and up-and-coming businessmen and women, you hold the power to provide the consumer with responsible options that bring us all closer together. The more socially responsible the options, the less lonely it will be at the top.
A great company to look to is Sprouts Farmers Market. They have bins where customers scoop out exactly how much of a product they need, and those customers can bring back the same container to refill over and over again. Thus, waste is reduced and profit is made. This is in comparison to other markets where the same product is sold in a new container each and every time.
Mired in the junk of landfills, human beings will continue to get further from one another and their nurturing environment if their daily options only thicken junk piles. So, customers, seek out companies such as Sprouts that provide packaging-free options for your food. Entrepreneurs, a beauty and food supply chain that cuts costs by carrying all products in bins and providing refillable containers to customers would be a fabulous plan. Products would come to the store at a cheaper cost because companies would save money on packaging designs.
What we do about packaging is one measure of how our consumption patterns match our values and aspirations for ourselves, our children and the planet.
