#being old on the internet

Back when I was a little kid, plastic packaging wasn’t prevalant at all. Liquids and sauces were packaged in glass. Dry goods were packaged in cardboard. Tear-off lids were made of foil. On the edge of my estate were the recycling bins and my mother would trot us all over once a week so we could smash the brown and green and clear bottles into the correct bins. It was fantastic

But then it was revealed just how rapidly the forests were disappearing all over the world. It was a disaster, the world’s lungs were vanishing, and obviously it was all because of the individual consumers who were buying massive quantities of paper.

(whereas in actual fact most paper and cardboard came from farmed forests planted with rapidly-maturing trees that are harvested and replaced on the regular, not from virgin old-growth rainforest. We know these days why forests are being razed, but in the pre-internet era the only sources of information we had were newsprint and TV news headlines)

When companies started offering plastic versions of their packaging it was seen as a way the consumer could cut down on their paper waste, even though the plastic was flimsier and had to go into the bin as no one had worked out how to recycle it yet, but we were assured that’d be coming soon!

(and more insidiously, the glass packaged foods were now a few pence more expensive than the plastic packaged food. Was it really worth making a stand over tomato sauce? No, buy plastic, save the trees)

Nowadays it was obvious what happened: the companies realised they could save a couple pence by packaging their goods in moulded plastic rather than the traditional packages, so made a big fuss about the unsustainability of their old packaging in order to convince shoppers that they were making The Right Choice by moving over to plastic packaging.

Greenwashing has been happening for decades and it’s always been an advertising campaign.