Posted by Bruce Bourgoine who blogs at
Kennebec Blues and Dirigo Blue.
Let's drastically reduce filling existing landfills and eliminate litter that uses our roadsides as a free "landfill" by reducing all packaging waste. Creating an empowered National Council to Reduce Packaging would be an appropriate first step to accomplish the following mission:
- Extend the "bottle bill" deposit concept to
all packaging (that is what bottles and cans are).
- Use a formula that makes single use packaging deposits for all food and drink items in particular more expensive than multi-serving containers.
- Assign national and regional chain fast food restaurants physical cleanup responsibility (
not "adopt a highway" but with their employees) for a generously defined market area.
- Outlaw packaging that encases any item in more than two layers of materials with exemptions for medical sterile materials for 2 years. Then outlaw packaging in more than one layer of material.
- Reward manufacturers that create packaging that serves practical permanent multi-uses. Bring back
grape jelly in Flintstones table glassware!
- Have a senior citizen sub-panel also approve all packaging for user friendliness; especially
force ink jet cartridge manufacturers to appear in person before the panel.
- Provide incentives to sell materials without packaging like my local hardware store does for screws and bolts. Big box hardware would have to give 50% of their collected deposits on like items to the little neighborhood hardware store as an offset.
- Reward especially efficient and eco-friendly packaging "
Standard Patriotic American Packaging Status" (SPAPS -
acronyms are fun) that grant a patent to sell the standard packaging to similar companies or product providers at a significant subsidized rate.