I have already mentioned that we all need to do a bit more for our environment and especially where waste is concerned, and larger companies will undoubtedly come under more scrutiny these days when we are talking about waste and the effect it will have on our planet’s resources and the outcome it has on other aspects such as unnecessary transport and disposing of the unnecessary waste they have created.
Tonight it is the turn of two of our biggest crisp manufacturers, these being Walkers and McCoy’s. And as I always try to do, I try to talk facts and so there can be no arguing, and the photographs will prove that too or is there something about packing crisps I don’t understand, but I have seen other crisps packed with very little leftover space, I don’t know maybe I am missing something; however, I‘ll continue
Importantly though on this occasion, I am talking only about the multi-packs that these companies sell, and these multi-packs only. But I find it hard to believe just how big these individual bags are compared to the number of crisps actually in them, to the extent the bags could be nearly halved, or the number of crisps nearly doubled depending on how you look at the situation and let me show you what I mean.
Two photos show my fingers across two different packets of crisps, and this simply shows the level that the crisps stop, or come up to when the bag is open, and all is normal. And as you can see it is approximately halfway up the bag, and half is 50%, ironic really that the Walkers bag states 50%, albeit for another reason!
So without being exact, I am using the figure of ‘approximately 50%.’ As you can see from the open bag of one of the packs, there is an awful lot of fresh air and space available in the bag. I have only added a photo of one brand as the second would have just looked the same, and I’m sure you will agree that the photos are pretty convincing evidence for me using this figure – and so to my point.
How many packets of these crisps do the two companies sell in a year between them? I couldn’t find out on an internet search, and there are a variety of their multi-packs, and I am assuming here that they are all the same size. However many packets they sell, can you imagine how much packaging would be saved if they reduced the size of the packet to suit the number of crisps inside? I wish I could work it out, but without those sales figures I’m slightly stuck, but there is more. If the size of the small individual pack size were to be reduced, they could also reduce the size of the large outer pack, saving even more, or again adding more small packets depending on how we look at it.
I assume they have sold packs like this for many years, and will probably continue to do so, and so take a period of ten years, either side of 2020, and calculate how much waste these two large companies have generated and will generate in unnecessary waste? It would run into tons and tons I’m sure, and as with so many other situations, what about the demand put on our planet to produce the unnecessary waste, the transportation, the waste disposal etc. etc. etc.
It also makes me wonder just how much money they would have saved over these ten years alone, had they spent 50% less on unnecessary packaging? On that note, I appreciate that money may need to be spent to change machinery or make changes to existing machinery to accommodate the change in bag sizes, but surely it would have been worthwhile?
But from another angle, I wonder how much is to do with marketing and initial impressions, do these people think that if they produced much smaller bags of their product, we wouldn’t want to buy it, maybe we would think that with the bags being so small that they are not value for money, are they fooling us by design and first impressions, I don’t know, but I know marketing plays a big part in the design of the item being sold?
I like both these products, especially the crinkly one, I have nothing against either of these companies, but they are big, they are under the spotlight because of their success, and they need to be seen to be doing more.
Either way, I’d like to know what they think, and if I have missed something with the way crisps have to be packed I will happily delete this post!