One school of thought holds that using less packaging for products is the responsibility for businesses and supermarkets; others, however, believe that customers themselves should less tend to buy products with too much packaging. Personally, these views are not mutually exclusive and should be adopted together for the most desirable outcomes.
On the one hand, it is understandable why some support companies and supermarkets being accountable for the reduction of product packages. This can be attributed to the fact that such subconsciousness can help enhance residents’ awareness of protecting the environment. This is because, when consumers realize and avoid purchase of those goods that are overpackaged, they would consolidate healthier and environmentally friendlier consumption habits. In this light, it can reinforce individuals’ perception about other emerging environmental issues, namely deforestation or biodiversity loss, which is impacted by such small habits of them on a daily basis. However, I would argue that this idea is unable to bring feasible benefits instantly because consumption habits have been woven into the fabric of daily life and not everyone can accept the good of the environment at the expense of their convenience, thereby requiring a long period of time to thoroughly change the consumers’ tendency.
On the other hand, some people are of the opinion that the changing efforts should come from firms and chain stores because they believe those producers can make differences at the larger scale. The key rationale behind this is they can create and control packaging at the source, which makes it easier for them to regulate the amount of packaging produced and proactively control people’s consumption habits. For example, they can incentivize consumers to bring along recyclable boxes or canvas bags when going shopping through cutting on a considerable amount of single-use plastic packaging. Therefore, this idea can motivate the changes of environment problems more radically and efficiently. That said, there are some confronting challenges due to the fact that companies have to research alternative packaging that is environmentally friendly but also assures the quality of commodities when reaching consumers, especially some specific ones such as fresh food and fragile goods, entailing huge changes in machines, designs, and manufacture stage, incurring much costs and may discouraging them.
In conclusion, I assert that it would be more holistic to have concerted actions from both consumers and producers. While consumers make an effort to buy less overpackaged products, in the meantime, companies and retailers would have time and motivation to prepare for the huge transformations in the minimization of packaging.